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MODERN BRITISH 
POETRY 



EDITED BY 



LOUIS UNTERMEYER 

Author of * ' Challenge^ ' ' ''''Including Horace ^""^ 
''''Modern American Poetry ^''^ etc. 



m 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1920 






COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 



©Cf.A571879 



AUG -4 Id20 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

For permission to reprint the material in this volume, 
the editor wishes, first of all, to acknowledge his debt to 
those poets whose co-operation has been of such assistance 
not only in finally determining upon the choice of their 
poems, but in collecting dates, biographical data, etc. 
Secondly, he wishes to thank the publishers, most of 
whom are holders of the copyrights. The latter indebted- 
ness is specifically acknowledged to : 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY and A. P. WaTT & SON — 

For " The Return " from The Five Nations and for " An 
Astrologer's Song " from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard 
Kipling. Thanks also are due to Mr. Kipling himself for 
personal permission to reprint these poems. 

Doubleday, Page & Company and Martin Secker — 

For the poem from Collected Poems by James Elroy Flecker. 

E. P. DuTTON & Company — 

For the poems from The Old Huntsman, Counter- Attack and 
Picture Shoiv by Siegfried Sassoon. 

Four Seas Company — 
For poems from War and Love by Richard Aldington and 
The Mountainy Singer by Seosarah MacCathmhaoil (Joseph 
Campbell). 

Henry Holt and Company — 
For poems from Peacock Pie and The Listeners by Walter 
de la Mare and Poems by Edward Thomas. 

Houghton Mifflin Company — 

For two poems from Poems, 1908-1919, by John Drinkwater, 
both of which are used by permission of, and by special 
arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the author- 
ized publishers. 

B. W. HUEBSCH — 

For the selections from Chamber Music by James Joyce, 
Songs to Save a Soul and Before Daivn by Irene Ruther- 



Acknowledgments 

ford McLeod, Amores, Look! We Have Come Through!, 
and Neis} Poems by D. H. Lawrence. 

Alfred A. Knopf — 
For poems from The Collected Poems of William H. 
Davies, Fairies and Fusiliers by Robert Graves, The Queeti 
of China and Other Poems by Edward Shanks, and Poems: 
First Series by J. C. Squire. 

John Lane Company — 

For the selections from Poems by G. K. Chesterton, Ballads 
and Songs by John Davidson, The Collected Poems of 
Rupert Brooke, Admirals All by Henry Newbolt, Herod 
and Lyrics and Dramas by Stephen Phillips, The Hope of 
the World and Other Poems by William Watson, and In 
Cap and Bells by Owen Seaman. 

The London Mercury — 

For "Going and Staying" by Thomas Hardy and "The 
House That Was " by Laurence Binyon. 

The Macmillan Company — 

For the selections from Fires and Borderlands and Thor- 
oughfares by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Poems by Ralph 
Hodgson, the sonnet from Good Friday and Other Poems 
by John Masefield, and the passage (entitled in this volume 
"Rounding the Horn") from "Dauber" in The Story of 
a Round-House by John Masefield. 

G. P. Putnam's Sons — 
For the title poem from In Flanders Fields by John 
McCrae. 

The Poetry Bookshop (England) — 

For two excerpts from Strange Meetings by Harold Monro 
and for the poems from the biennial anthologies, Georgian- 
Poetry. 

Charles Scribner's Sons — 

For the quotations from Poems by William Ernest Henley. 

Frederick A. Stokes Company — 

For the poem from Ardours and Endurances by Robert 
Nichols. 

Longmans, Green & Co., as the representatives of B. H. 
Blackwell, of Oxford — 
For a poem by Edith Sitwell from The Mother. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

xi 



Introductory 

Thomas Hardy (1840- ) 

In Time of " The Breaking of Nations "... 3 

Going and Staying 4 

The Man He Killed 4 

Robert Bridges (1844- ) 

Winter Nightfall 5 

Nightingales 7 

Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) 

Ode 8 

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) 

Invictus . 10 

The Blackbird 10 

A Bowl of Roses ii 

Before ii 

Margaritas Sorori 12 

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) 

Summer Sun 13 

Winter-Time 14 

Romance 15 

Requiem 16 

Alice Meynell (1850- ) 

A Thrush Before Dawn 16 

Fiona MacLeod {William Sharp) (1855-1905) 

The Valley of Silence 18 

The Vision 19 

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) 

Requiescat 20 

Impression du Matin 21 

John Davidson (1857-1909) 

A Ballad of Hell 22 

Imagination ^^ 

Ul 



Contents 

PAGE 

William Watson (1858- ) 

Ode in May 28 

Estrangement 30 

Song 31 

Francis Thompson (1859-1907) 

Daisy 32 

To Olivia 34 

An Arab Love-Song 35 

A. E. HousMAN (1859- ) 

Reveille 36 

When I Was One-and-Twenty 37 

With Rue My Heart is Laden 38 

To An Athlete Dying Young 38 

" Loveliest of Trees " 39 

Douglas Hyde (i860- ) 

I Shall Not Die for Thee 40 

Amy Levy (1861-1889) 

Epitaph 42 

In the Mile End Road ^z 

Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1861- ) 

Sheep and Lambs 43 

All-Souls 44 

Owen Seaman (1861- ) 

To An Old Fogey 45 

Thomas of the Light Heart 47 

Henry Newbolt (1862- ) 

Drake's Drum 49 

Arthur Symons (1865- ) 

In the Wood of Finvara 50 

Modern Beauty 51 

William Butler Yeats (1865- ) 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree 53 

The Song of the Old Mother 53 

The Cap and Bells 54 

An Old Song Resung 55 

Rudyard Kipling (1865- ) 

Gunga Din 57 

The Return 61 

The Conundrum of the Workshops 6j 

An Astrologer's Song 66 

iv 



Contents 

PAGE 

Richard Le Gallienne (1866- ) 

A Ballad of London 69 

Regret 70 

Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) 

Mystic and Cavalier 2i 

To a Traveller 73 

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) 

To One in Bedlam 24 

You V/ould Have Understood Me • • • • 25 

"A. E." (George William Russell) (1867- ) 

The Great Breath 76 

The Unknown God 27 

Stephen Phillips (1868-1915) 

Fragment from " Herod " 78 

Beautiful Lie the Dead 78 

A Dream 79 

Laurence Binyon (1869- ) 

A Song 25 

The House That Was . . . . . . . .80 

Alfred Douglas (1870- ) 

The Green River 81 

T. Sturge Moore (1870- ) 

The Dying Swan 82 

Silence Sings 82 

William H. Davies (1870- ) 

Days Too Short 84 

The Moon 85 

The Villain 85 

The Example 86 

Hilaire Belloc (1870- ) 

The South Country 87 

Anthony C. Deane (1870- ) 

The Ballad of the Billycock 90 

A Rustic Song 9^ 

J. M. Synge (1871-1909) 

Beg-Inniah 95 

A Translation from Petrarch 9^ 

To the Oaks of Glencree 9^ 

Nora Hopper Chesson (1871-1906) 

A Connaught Lament 97 

V 



Contents 

PAGE 

Eva Gore-Booth (1872- ) 

The Waves of Breffny 98 

Walls 99 

MoiRA O'Neill 

A Broken Song 99 

Beauty's a Flower 100 

John McCrae (1872-1918) 

In Flanders Fields loi 

Ford Madox Hueffer (1873- ) 

Clair de Lune 102 

There Shall Be More Joy 104 

Walter De la Mare (1873- ) 

The Listeners 106 

An Epitaph 107 

Tired Tim 108 

Old Susan . - 108 

Nod 109 

G. K. Chesterton (1874- ) 

Lepanto iii 

A Prayer in Darkness 118 

The Donkey 119 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878- ) 

Prelude 120 

The Stone 121 

Sight 124 

John Masefield (1878- ) 

A Consecration 126 

Sea-Fever 127 

Rounding the Horn 128 

The Choice 131 

Sonnet 132 

Lord Dunsany (1878- ) 

Songs from an Evil Wood 13J 

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) 

If I Should Ever By Chance 136 

Tall Nettles 137 

Fifty Faggots 137 

Cock-Crove 138 

Seumas O'Sullivan (1879- ) 

Praise 135 

vi 



Contents 

PAGE 

Ralph Hodgson 

Eye 140 

Time, You Old Gipsy Man 142 

The Birdcatcher 144 

The Mystery 144 

Harold Monro (1879- ) 

The Nightingale Near the House 145 

Every Thing 146 

Strange Meetings 149 

T. M. Kettle (1880-1916) 

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God . . .150 

Alfred Noyes (1880- ) 

Sherwood 151 

The Barrel-Organ 154 

Epilogue i6i 

Padraic Colum (188 1- ) 

The Plougher 162 

An Old Woman of the Roads 164 

Joseph Campbell {Seosamh MacCathmhaoil) (1881- ) 

I Am the Mountainy Singer 165 

The Old Woman i66 

James Stephens (1882- ) 

The Shell 167 

What Tomas An Buile Said In a Pub . . . .168 
To the Four Courts, Please 169 

John Drinkwater (1882- ) 

Reciprocity 170 

A Town Window 170 

James Joyce (1882- ) 

I Hear an Army 171 

J. C. Squire (1884- ) 

A House 172 

Lascelles Abercrombie (1884- ) 

From "Vashti" 175 

Song 176 

James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) 

The Old Ships 178 

D. H. Lawrence (1885- ) 

People *8o 

Piano 180 

vii 



Contents 

PAGE 

John Freeman (1885- ) 

Stone Trees 181 

Shane Leslie (i886- ) 

Fleet Street 183 

The Pater of the Cannon 183 

Frances Cornford (1886- ) 

Preexistence 184 

Anna Wickham 

The Singer 186 

Reality 186 

Song 187 

Siegfried Sassoon (1886- ) 

To Victory 189 

Dreamers 190 

The Rear-Guard 190 

Thrushes 191 

Aftermath 192 

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) 

The Great Lover 195 

Dust 198 

The Soldier 200 

W. M. Letts (1887- ) 

Grandeur 201 

The Spires of Oxford 203 

Francis Brett Young 

Lochanilaun 204 

F. S. Flint 

London 205 

Edith Sitwell 

The Web of Eros . 206 

Interlude 207 

F. W. Harvey (1888- ) 

The Bugler 208 

T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) 

Sportsmen in Paradise 209 

W. J. Turner (1889- ) 

Romance 210 

Patrick MacGill (1890) 

By-the-Way 211 

Death and the Fairies 212 

viii 



Contents 

Francis Ledwidge (1891-1917) * 

An Evening in England 213 

Evening Clouds 214 

Irene Rutherford McLeod (1891- ) 

" Is Love, then, so Simple " 215 

Lone Dog 215 

Richard Aldington (1892- ) 

Prelude 216 

Images 217 

At the British Museum 218 

Edward Shanks (1892- ) 

Complaint 219 

OSBERT SiTWELL (1892- ) 

The Blind Pedlar 220 

Progress 221 

Robert Nichols (1893- ) 

Nearer 222 

Charles H. Sorley (1895-1915) 

Two Sonnets 223 

To Germany 225 

Robert Graves (1895- ) 

It's a Queer Time 226 

A Pinch of Salt 227 

I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned? . . 228 

The Last Post 229 

Index of Authors and Poems 231 



IX 



INTRODUCTORY 

The New Influences and Tendencies 

Mere statistics are untrustworthy; dates are even less 
dependable. But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call 
" modern " English literature may be said to date from 
about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly *' of the 
period " are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat 
earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into 
seven periods. They are ( i ) The decay of Victorianism 
and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise 
and decline of the ^Esthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscu- 
lar influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ire- 
land, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of 
mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of 
the rhymed narrative, (7) The war and the appear- 
ance of " The Georgians.'* It may be interesting to trace 
these developments in somewhat greater detail. 

THE END OF VICTORIANISM 

The age commonly called Victorian came to an end 
about 1885. It was an age distinguished by many true 
idealists and many false Ideals. It was, in spite of its 
notable artists, on an entirely different level from the 
epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, 
not universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt 
and tinsel; its realism was as cheap as its showy glass 

xl 



Introductory 

pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacassars. 
The period was full of a pessimistic resignation (the note 
popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a kind 
of cowardice or at least a negation which, refusing to see 
any glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle 
Ages, King Arthur, the legend of Troy — to the suave 
surroundings of a dream-world instead of the hard con- 
tours of actual experience. 

At its worst, it was a period of smugness, of placid and 
pious sentimentality — epitomized by the rhymed sermons 
of Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose Proverbial Philosophy 
was devoured with all Its cloying and Indigestible sweet- 
meats by thousands. The same tendency is apparent, 
though far less objectionably, in the moralizing lays of 
Lord Thomas Macaulay, In the theatrically emotionalized 
verses of Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis 
Morris — even in the lesser later work of Alfred Tenny- 
son. 

And, without Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the 
outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in 
Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. 
Austin brought the laureateshlp, which had been held by 
poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, 
to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream 
of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the 
merest trickle — and diluted it. 

The poets of a generation before this time were fired 
with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of 
nature, an insatiable hunger for truth In all its forms and 
manifestations. The characteristic poets of the Victorian 

xii 



Introductory 

Era, says Max Plowman, " wrote under the dominance of 
churchliness, of * sweetness and light,' and a thousand 
lesser theories that have not truth but comfort for their 
end." 

The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period 
had already begun ; the best of Victorianism can be found 
not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers 
like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, 
William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy 
with their time. 

But it was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now 
famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion 
a beauty whose existence was its " own excuse for being." 
Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use 
of aestheticism as a slogan ; the battle-cry of the group was 
actually the now outworn but then revolutionary *' Art 
for Art's sake "! And, so sick were people of the shoddy 
ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate past, that 
the slogan won. At least, temporarily. 

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE .ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY 

The Yellow Book, the organ of a group of young 
writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a 
reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and 
influenced by the French. The group of contributors was 
a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. 
And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary 
airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era. 

Almost the first act of the " new " men was to rouse 
and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of- 

xiii 



Introductory 

the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and 
natural an impulse, still has a place of its own — especially 
as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian pro- 
priety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and 
energetic audacities of the sensational younger authors 
and artists ; the old walls fell ; the public, once so apathetic 
to belles lettres, was more than attentive to every phase 
of literary experimentation. The last decade of the nine- 
teenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art and 
ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in his 
penetrative summary. The Eight e en-N ine ties, " as though 
the declining century wished to make amends for several 
decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be something 
more than a coincidence that placed this decade at the 
close of a century, and fin de siecle may have been at 
once a swan song and a death-bed repentance." 

But later on, the movement (if such it may be called), 
surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses 
of revolt; it degenerated into a half-hearted defense of 
artificialities. 

It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or 
Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize 
its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; 
it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extrava- 
ganza of extravagance. " The period " (I am again quot- 
ing Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of 
decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The de- 
cadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorifi- 
cation of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the 
one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the 

xiv 



Introductory 

other. . . . The eroticism which became so prevalent 
in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor 
because it was little more than a pose — not because it 
was erotic. ... It was a passing mood which gave the 
poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance ; a perfume faint 
yet unmistakable and strange." 

But most of the elegant and disillusioned young men 
overshot their mark. Mere health reasserted itself; an 
inherent repressed vitality sought new channels. Arthur 
Symons deserted his hectic Muse, Richard Le Gallienne 
abandoned his preciosity, and the group began to dis- 
integrate. The ^esthetic philosophy was wearing thin; it 
had already begun to fray and reveal its essential shabbi- 
ness. Wilde himself possessed the three things which 
he said the English would never forgive — youth, power 
and enthusiasm. But in trying to make an exclusive cult 
of beauty, Wilde had also tried to make it evade actuality ; 
he urged that art should not, in any sense, be a part of 
life but an escape from it. *' The proper school to learn 
art in is not Life — but Art." And in the same essay 
("The Decay of Lying") he wrote, "All bad Art 
comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating 
them into ideals." Elsewhere he said, " The first duty 
in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second 
duty is no one has discovered." 

Such a cynical and decadent philosophy could not go 
unchallenged. Its artistocratic blue-bloodedness was 
bound to arouse the red blood of common reality. This 
negative attitude received its answer in the work of that 
yea-sayer, W. E. Henley. 

XV 



Introductory 

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 

Henley repudiated this languid a^stheticism ; he scorned 
a negative art which was out of touch with the world. 
His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that 
mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often 
dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he 
knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hungers 
of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or 
technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to 
share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic 
world. And so Henley came like a swift salt breeze 
blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. 
He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of the joy 
of living and the courage of the " unconquerable soul." 
He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a 
critic and editor. In the latter capacity' he gathered about 
him such men as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kip- 
ling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T. E. 
Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his dis- 
ciples, but none of them came into contact with him 
without being influenced in some way by his sharp and 
positive personality. A pioneer and something of a 
prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings 
of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor 
Rodin. 

If at times Henley*s verse is imperialistic, over-muscu- 
lar and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only 
by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for 
nobility in whatever cause it was joined. He never dis- 

xvi 



Introductory 

dained the actual world in any of its moods — bus-drivers, 
hospital interiors, scrubwomen, a panting train, the 
squalor of London's alleys, all found a voice in his lines 
— and his later work contains more than a hint of the 
delight in science and machinery which was later to be 
sounded more fully in the work of Rudyard Kipling. 

THE CELTIC REVIVAL AND J. M. SYNGE 

In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his Wander- 
ings of Oisin: in the same year Douglas Hyde, the 
scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his Book of Gaelic 

Stories. 

The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish litera- 
ture may be said to date from the publication of those two 
books. The fundamental idea of both men and their fol- 
lowers was the same. It was to create a literature which 
would express the national consciousness of Ireland 
through a purely national art. They began to reflect the 
strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and hero- 
ism that is immortally Irish. This community of fellow- 
ship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied work 
of William Butler Yeats, " A. E." (George W. Russell), 
Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, 
Padraic Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a 
short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old 
myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new sig- 
nificance, it seemed for a while that the movement would 
lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasmg 
concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the 
tramp, followed ; an interest that was something of a re- 

xvii 



Introductory 

action against the influence of Yeats and his mystic other- 
worldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its 
height vv^ith John Millington Synge, who was not only 
the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote 
such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold 
Williams) " one of the greatest dramatists who has 
written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too 
small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and 
yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its 
content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to 
serve as a bold banner — a sort of a brilliant Jolly Roger 
— for the younger men of the following period. It was 
not only this dramatist's brief verses and his intensely 
musical prose but his sharp prefaces that were to exercise 
such an influence. 

In the notable introduction to the Playboy of the West- 
ern World, Synge declared, *' When I was writing The 
Shadow of the Glen some years ago, I got more aid than 
any learning could have given me from a chink in the 
floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that 
let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in 
the kitchen. This matter is, I think, of some importance ; 
for in countries where the imagination of the people, and 
the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible 
for a writer to be rich and copious in his words — and at 
the same time to give the reality which is at the root of 
all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." This 
quotation explains his idiom, possibly the sharpest-flavored 
and most vivid in modern literature. 

As to Synge's poetic power, it is unquestionably great- 

xviii 



Introductory 

est in his plays. In The Well of the Saints, The Playboy 
of the Western World and Riders to the Sea there are 
more polgnance, beauty of form and richness of language 
than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan 
times. Yeats, when he first heard Synge's early one-act 
play, The Shadow of the Glen, is said to have exclaimed 
" Euripides." A half year later when Synge read him 
Riders to the Sea, Yeats again confined his enthusiasm to 
a single word: — "iEschylus!" Years have shown that 
Yeats's appreciation was not as exaggerated as many might 
suppose. 

But although Synge's poetry was not his major con- 
cern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and 
eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his 
followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction 
against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of 
his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism 
of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to 
his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and 
at the same time a classic credo for all that we call the 
" new " poetry. " I have often thought," it begins, " that 
at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, 
modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, 
using * poetic ' in the same special sense. The poetry of 
exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose 
their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write 
poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to 
lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease 
to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness 
in building shops. . . . Even if we grant that exalted 

xix 



Introductory 

poetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things 
of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is 
exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood." 

RUDYARD KIPLING 

New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose 
themselves simultaneously in places and people where 
there has been no point of contact. Even before Synge 
published his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, 
Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, 
the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded 
as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England 
had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggish- 
ness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with 
high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before 
him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication 
of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892 brought him sudden 
notice. By 1895 he was internationally famous. Brush- 
ing over the pallid attempts to revive a pallid past, he 
rode triumphantly on a wave of buoyant and sometimes 
brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material 
world; he did more — he glorified it. He pierced the 
coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things — things like 
machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, 
the dirty by-products of science (witness " M'Andrews 
Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy") — and uncovered their 
hidden glamour. " Romance is gone," sighed most of his 
contemporaries, 

". . . and all unseen 
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen." 

XX 



Introductory 

That sentence (from his poem "The King") contains 
the key to the manner in which the author of The Five 
Nations helped to rejuvenate English verse. 

Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms 
of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between 
the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of 
vigor, beginning with Masefield. There are occasional 
and serious defects in Kipling's work — particularly in his 
more facile poetry; he falls into a journalistic ease that 
tends to turn into jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum- 
banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. 
But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines 
through his achievements. His best work reveals an in- 
tensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally 
tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place 
of the universal. 

JOHN MASEFIELD 

All art is a twofold revivifying — a recreation of subject 
and a reanimating of form. And poetry' becomes perenni- 
ally " new " by returning to the old — with a different 
consciousness, a greater awareness. In 191 1, when art was 
again searching for novelty, John Masefield created some- 
thing startling and new by going back to 1385 and The 
Canterbury Pilgrims. Employing both the Chaucerian 
model and a form similar to the practically forgotten 
Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote in rapid succession, The 
Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye 
Street (1912), Dauber (1912), The Daffodil Fields 
(1913) — four astonishing rhymed narratives and four 

xxi 



Introductory 

of the most remarkable poems of our generation. Ex- 
pressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, unit- 
ing old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclama- 
tion that " the strong things of life are needed in poetry 
also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse 
can be human again it must be brutal." 

Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of 
beauty and brutality which is its most human and en- 
during quality. He brought back that rich and almost 
vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, 
of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of 'Heine — and of 
all those who were not only great artists but great 
humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his 
place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imag- 
inative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from 
one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they 
themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than 
anything in the world — or out of it. Few things in con- 
temporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of 
Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of 
Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming 
youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous descrip- 
tion of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly 
done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes 
are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there 
is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearian 
sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate 
strength that leaps through all his work from Salt Water 
Ballads (1902) to Reynard the Fox (1919). 



xxu 



Introductory 

" THE GEORGIANS " AND THE YOUNGER MEN 

There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation be- 
tween Masefield and the younger men. Although sev- 
eral of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets 
speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had 
already reinforced the " return to actuality " by turning 
from his first preoccupation with shining knights, fault- 
less queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of 
hackneyed mediaeval romances, to write about ferrymen, 
berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, 
carpenters — dramatizing (though sometimes theatricaliz- 
ing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary 
people in Livelihood, Daily Bread and Fires, This in- 
tensity had been asking new questions. It found its 
answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a 
new outlet. One hears its echoes in the younger poets 
like Siegfried Sassoon, with his poignant and unspar- 
ing poems of conflict; in Robert Graves, who reflects it 
in a lighter and more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, 
whose wild ingenuities are redolent of the soil. And it 
finds its corresponding opposite in the limpid and un- 
perturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly 
magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter 
de la Mare; in the quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. 
Davies. Among the others, the brilliant G. K. Chester- 
ton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic Rupert Brooke 
(who owes less to Masefield and his immediate predeces- 
sors than he does to the passionately intellectual Donne), 
the introspective D. H. Lawrence and the versatile J. C. 

xxiii 



Introductory 

Squire, are perhaps best known to American readers. 
All of the poets mentioned in the foregoing paragraph 
(with the exception of Noyes) have formed themselves in 
a loose group called " The Georgians," and an anthology 
of their best work has appeared every two years since 
1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drink- 
water are also listed among the Georgian poets. When 
their first collection appeared in March, 19 13, Henry 
Newbolt, a critic as well as poet, wrote : " These younger 
poets have no temptation to be false. They are not for 
making something * pretty,* something up to the standard 
of professional patterns. . . . They write as grown 
men walk, each with his own unconscious stride and ges- 
ture. ... In short, they express themselves and seem 
to steer without an effort between the dangers of innova- 
tion and reminiscence." The secret of this success, and 
for that matter, the success of the greater portion of 
English poetry, is not an exclusive discovery of the 
Georgian poets. It is their inheritance, derived from 
those predecessors who, " from Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse 
to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its 
adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English 
poetry is true to its period — and its past. 

This collection is obviously a companion volume to 
Modern American Poetry, which, in its restricted com- 
pass, attempted to act as an introduction to recent native 
verse. Modern British Poetry covers the same period 
(from about 1870 to 1920), follows the same chrono- 

xxiv 



Introductory 

logical scheme, but it is more amplified and goes into far 
greater detail than its predecessor. 

The two volumes, considered together, furnish inter- 
esting contrasts; they reveal certain similarities and cer- 
tain strange differences. Broadly speaking, modern 
American verse is sharp, vigorously experimental ; full of 
youth and its occasional — and natural — crudities. Eng- 
lish verse is smoother, more matured and, molded by 
centuries of literature, richer in associations and surer 
in artistry. Where the American output is often rude, 
extremely varied and uncoordinated (being the expression 
of partly indigenous, partly naturalized and largely un- 
assimilated ideas, emotions and races), the English prod- 
uct is formulated, precise and, in spite of its fluctuations, 
true to its past. It goes back to traditions as old as 
Chaucer (witness the narratives of Masefield and 
Gibson) or tendencies as classic as Drayton, Herrick and 
Blake — as in the frank lyrics of A. E. Housman, the 
artless lyricism of Ralph Hodgson, the na'if wonder of 
W. H. Davies. And if English poetry may be com- 
pared to a broad and luxuriating river (while American 
poetry might be described as a sudden rush of uncon- 
nected mountain torrents, valley streams and city sluices), 
it will be inspiring to observe how its course has been 
temporarily deflected in the last forty years; how it has 
swung away from one tendency toward another; and 
how, for all its bends and twists, it has lost neither its 
strength nor its nobility. 

L. U. 

New York City. 
January, 1920. 

XXV 



MODERN BRITISH POETRY 



Thomas Hardy 



Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, and has for years been 
famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer of intense and 
sombre novels. His Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the 
Obscure are possibly his best known, although his IVessex Tales 
and Life's Little Ironies are no less imposing. 

It was not until he was almost sixty, in 1898 to be precise, 
that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a poet. 
The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in three 
parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, a 
massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. 
It is the apotheosis of Hardy the novelist. Lascelles Aber- 
crombie calls this work, which is partly a historical play, partly 
a visionary drama, " the biggest and most consistent exhibition 
of fatalism in literature." While its powerful simplicity and 
tragic impressiveness overshadow his shorter poems, many of 
his terse lyrics reveal the same vigor and impact of a strong 
personality. His collected poems were published by The Mac- 
millan Company in 1919 and reveal another phase of one of 
the greatest living writers of English. 



IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS " 

Only a man harrowing clods 

In a slow silent walk, 
With an old horse that stumbles and nods 

Half asleep as they stalk. 

Only thin smoke without flame 

From the heaps of couch grass: 
Yet this will go onward the same 

Though Dynasties pass. 
3 



Thomas Hardy 

Yonder a maid and her wight 

Come whispering by; 
War's annals will fade into night 

Ere their story die. 



GOING AND STAYING 

The moving sun-shapes on the spray, 
The sparkles where the brook was flowing, 
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May, — 
These were the things we wished would stay; 
But they were going. 

Seasons of blankness as of snow, 
The silent bleed of a world decaying, 
The moan of multitudes in woe, — 
These were the things we wished would go; 
But they were staying. 

THE MAN HE KILLED 
{From *' The Dynasts'*) 

" Had he and I but met 
By some old ancient inn, 
We should have sat us down to wet 
Right many a nipperkin ! 

" But ranged as infantry, 
And staring face to face, 
I shot at him as he at me, 

And killed him in his place, 
4 



Thomas Hardy 



u 



I shot him dead because — 
Because he was my foe, 
Just so: my foe of course he was; 
That's clear enough; although 

" He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, 
Off-hand like — just as I — 
Was out of work — had sold his traps — 
No other reason why. 

" Yes; quaint and curious war is! 
You shoot a fellow down 
You'd treat, if met where any bar is, 
Or help to half-a-crown." 



Robert Bridges 

Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and educated at Eton and 
Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After traveling extensively, 
he studied medicine in London and practiced until 1882. Most 
of his poems, like his occasional plays, are classical in tone as 
well as treatment. He was appointed poet laureate in 1913, 
following Alfred Austin. His command of the secrets of rhythm 
and a subtle versification give his lines a firm delicacy and 
beauty of pattern. 



WINTER NIGHTFALL 

The day begins to droop, — 
Its course is done: 

But nothing tells the place 

Of the setting sun. 

5 



Robert Bridges 

The hazy darkness deepens, 

And up the lane 
You may hear, but cannot see, 

The homing wain. 

An engine pants and hums 
In the farm hard by: 

Its lowering smoke is lost 
In the lowering sky. 

The soaking branches drip, 
And all night through 

The dropping will not cease 
In the avenue. 

A tall man there in the house 
Must keep his chair: 

He knows he will never again 
Breathe the spring air: 

His heart is worn with work; 

He is giddy and sick 
If he rise to go as far 

As the nearest rick: 

He thinks of his morn of life, 
His hale, strong years; 

And braves as he may the night 
Of darkness and tears. 



Robert Bridges 

NIGHTINGALES 

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come, 

And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom 

Ye learn your song : 
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there. 
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air 
Bloom the year long! 

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams : 
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams, 

A throe of the heart. 
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound. 
No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound. 

For all our art. 

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men 

We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then, 

As night is withdrawn 
From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of 
May, 
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day 
Welcome the dawn. 



Arthur O'Shaughnessy 

The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaugh- 
nessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a 
while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to 
the Department of Natural History. His first literary success, 
Epic of Women (1870), promised a brilliant future for the 
young poet, a promise strengthened by his Music and Moonlight 
(1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were dashed by 
periods of illness and an early death in London in 1881. 

The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best, but 
is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, one 
of the immortal classics of our verse. 



ODE 

We are the music-makers, 

And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams ; 
World-losers and world-forsakers, 

On whom the pale moon gleams: 
Yet we are the movers and shakers 

Of the world for ever, it seems. 

With wonderful deathless ditties 
We build up the world's great cities, 

And out of a fabulous story 

We fashion an empire's glor>': 
One man with a dream, at pleasure, 

Shall go forth and conquer a crown ; 
And three with a new song's measure 

Can trample an empire down. 
8 



Arthur O'Shaughnessy 

We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth, 
Built Nineveh with our sighing, 

And Babel itself with our mirth; 
And o'erthrew them with prophesying 

To the old of the new world's worth ; 
For each age is a dream that is dying, 

Or one that is coming to birth. 



William Ernest Henley 

William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated 
at the Grammar School of Gloucester. From childhood he was 
afflicted with a tuberculous disease which finally necessitated 
the amputation of a foot. His Hospital Verses, those vivid 
precursors of current free verse, were a record of the time 
when he was at the infirmary at Edinburgh; they are sharp 
with the sights, sensations, even the actual smells of the sick- 
room. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his continued 
poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and 
energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world 
shine out of the athletic London Voluntaries (1892) and the 
lightest and most musical lyrics in Hawthorn and Lavender 
(1898). 

The bulk of Henley's poetry is not great in volume. He has 
himself explained the small quantity of his work in a Preface 
to his Poems, first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1898. 
" A principal reason," he says, " is that, after spending the 
better part of my life in the pursuit of poetry, I found myself 
(about 1877) so utterly unmarketable that I had to own myself 
beaten in art, and to indict myself to journalism for the next 
ten years." Later on, he began to write again — " old dusty 
sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and cor- 



William Ernest Henley 

rection was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the 
lyrical instinct had slept — not died." 

After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted 
mostly to journalism, Henley died in 1903. 

INVICTUS 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate. 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate: 
I am the captain of my soul. 

THE BLACKBIRD 

The nightingale has a lyre of gold, 

The lark's is a clarion call, 
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, 

But I love him best of all. 
10 



William Ernest Henley 

For his song is all of the joy of life, 
And we in the mad, spring weather, 

We two have listened till he sang 
Our hearts and lips together. 



A BOWL OF ROSES 

It was a bowl of roses : 

There in the light they lay, 

Languishing, glorying, glowing 
Their life away. 

And the soul of them rose like a presence, 

Into me crept and grew, 
And filled me with something — some one — 

O, was it you ? 



BEFORE 

Behold me waiting — waiting for the knife. 
A little while, and at a leap I storm 
The thick sweet mystery of chloroform, 
The drunken dark, the little death-in-life. 
The gods are good to me: I have no wife, 
No innocent child, to think of as I near 
The fateful minute; nothing ail-too dear 
Unmans me for my bout of passive strife. 

II 



William Ernest Henley 

Yet I am tremulous and a trifle sick, 
And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little : 
My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. 
Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am ready 
But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: 
You carry Caesar and his fortunes — Steady! 

MARGARITiE SORORI 

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies ; 

And from the west, 

Where the sun, his day's work ended, 

Lingers as in content. 

There falls on the old, grey city 

An influence luminous and serene, 

A shining peace. 

The smoke ascends 

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 

Shine, and are changed. In the valley 

Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, 

Closing his benediction, 

Sinks, and the darkening air 

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night — 

Night with her train of stars 

And her great gift of sleep. 

So be my passing! 

My task accomplished and the long day done, 
My wages taken, and in my heart 
Some late lark singing, 
12 



William Ernest Henley 

Let me be gathered to the quiet west, 
The sundown splendid and serene, 
Death. 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Robeit Louis Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in 1850. He 
■was at first trained to be a lighthouse engineer, following the 
profession of his family. However, he studied law instead; 
was admitted to the bar in 1875; and abandoned law for 
literature a few years later. 

Though primarily a novelist, Stevenson has left one immortal 
book of poetry which is equally at home in the nursery and 
the library: A Child's Garden of Verses (first published in 
1885) is second only to Mother Goose's own collection in its 
lyrical simplicity and universal appeal. Underivoods (1887) 
and Ballads (1890) comprise his entire poetic output. As a 
genial essayist, he is not unworthy to be ranked with Charles 
Lamb. As a romancer, his fame rests securely on Kidnapped, 
the unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston, and that eternal 
classic of youth, Treasure Island. 

Stevenson died after a long and dogged fight with his illness, 
in the Samoan Islands in 1894. 

SUMMER SUN 

Great is the sun, and wide he goes 
Through empty heaven without repose; 
And in the blue and glowing days 
More thick than rain he showers his rays. 

Though closer still the blinds we pull 
To keep the shady parlour cool, 
Yet he will find a chink or two 
To slip his golden fingers through. 
13 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

The dusty attic, spider-clad, 
He, through the keyhole, maketh glad; 
And through the broken edge of tiles 
Into the laddered hay-loft smiles. 

Meantime his golden face around 
He bares to all the garden ground, 
And sheds a warm and glittering look 
Among the ivy's inmost nook. 

Above the hills, along the blue. 
Round the bright air with footing true, 
To please the child, to paint the rose. 
The gardener of the World, he goes. 



WINTER-TIME 

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed, 

A frosty, fiery sleepy-head ; 

Blinks but an hour or two ; and then, 

A blood-red orange, sets again. 

Before the stars have left the skies, 
At morning in the dark I rise; 
And shivering in my nakedness. 
By the cold candle, bathe and dress. 

Close by the jolly fire I sit 
To warm my frozen bones a bit; 
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore 
The colder countries round the door. 
14 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap 
Me in my comforter and cap; 
The cold wind burns my face, and blows 
Its frosty pepper up my nose. 

Black are my steps on silver sod; 
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad ; 
And tree and house, and hill and lake, 
Are frosted like a wedding-cake. 



ROMANCE 

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight 
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. 
I will make a palace fit for you and me. 
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. 

I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, 
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, 
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white 
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night. 

And this shall be for music when no one else is near, 
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! 
That only I remember, that only you admire. 
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. 



15 



Robert Louis Stevenson 



REQUIEM 

Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me lie: 

Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will. 

This be the verse you 'grave for me: 
Here he lies where he long'd to be; 

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill. 



Alice Meynell 

Alice Meynell was born in London in 1850. She was edu- 
cated at home and spent a great part of her childhood in Italy. 
She has written little, but that little is on an extremely high 
plane; her verses are simple, pensive and always distinguished. 
The best of her work is in Poems (1903). 



A THRUSH BEFORE DAWN 

A voice peals in this end of night 

A phrase of notes resembling stars, 
Single and spiritual notes of light. 
What call they at my window-bars? 
The South, the past, the day to be, 
An ancient infelicity. 
16 



Alice Meynell 

Darkling, deliberate, what sings 

This wonderful one, alone, at peace? 
What wilder things than song, what things 
Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece, 
Dearer than Italy, untold 
Delight, and freshness centuries old? 

And first first-loves, a multitude, 

The exaltation of their pain; 
Ancestral childhood long renewed ; 
And midnights of invisible rain; 

And gardens, gardens, night and day, 
Gardens and childhood all the way. 

What Middle Ages passionate, 

O passionless voice ! What distant bells 
Lodged in the hills, what palace state 
Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, 
Without desire, without dismay, 
Some morrow and some yesterday. 

All-natural things! But more — Whence came 

This yet remoter mystery? 
How do these starry notes proclaim 
A graver still divinity? 

This hope, this sanctity of fear? 
O innocent throat! O human earl 



17 



Fiona Macleod 

{William Sharp) 

William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 
1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, 
published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck 
{Vistas) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets" series. 

His feminine alter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different 
personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of an- 
other spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several 
volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little 
unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, 
the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in The Sin-Eater 
and Other Tales; the longer Pharais, A Romance of the Isles, 
is scarcely less unique. 

In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four 
volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 From the 
Hills of Dream appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; 
The Hour of Beauty, an even more distinctive collection, fol- 
lowed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result 
of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; the 
emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellectual 
and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that of Will- 
iam Sharp. 

He died in 1905. 



THE VALLEY OF SILENCE 

In the secret Valley of Silence 

No breath doth fall ; 
No wind stirs in the branches ; 
No bird doth call : 
As on a white wall 

A breathless lizard is still, 
So silence lies on the valley 
Breathlessly still. 
18 



Fiona Macleod 

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley 

An altar rises white : 
No rapt priest bends in awe 
Before its silent light: 
But sometimes a flight 

Of breathless words of prayer 
White- wing'd enclose the altar, 
Eddies of prayer. 

THE VISION 

In a fair place 

Of whin and grass, 
I heard feet pass 
Where no one was. 

I saw a face 

Bloom like a flower — 
Nay, as the rainbow-shower 
Of a tempestuous hour. 

It was not man, or woman: 
It was not human : 

But, beautiful and wild. 

Terribly undefiled, 

I knew an unborn child. 

Oscar Wilde 

Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even 
as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant 
career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the 
Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna* 

19 



Oscar Wilde 

Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became 
known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even 
more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and 
The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flip- 
pancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only 
surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. (See Preface.) 

Most of his poems in prose (such as The Happy Prince, The 
Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and His Soul) 
are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but 
in one long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), he 
sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison 
waa, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only 
produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol hni made possible his 
most poignant piece of writing, De Profundis, only a small 
part of which has been published. Salome, which has made 
the author's name a household word, was originally written in 
French in 1892 and later translated into English by Lord 
Alfred Douglas, accompanied by the famous illustrations by 
Aubrey Beardsley. More recently this heated drama, based 
on the story of Herod and Herodias, was made into an opera 
by Richard Strauss. 

Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the fore- 
runners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching 
ironies. One sees the origin of a whole school of drama in 
such epigrams as " The history of woman is the history of the 
worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny 
of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts." 
Or " There is only one thing in the world worse than being 
talked about, and that is not being talked about." 

Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900. 



REQUIESCAT 

Tread lightly, she is near 
Under the snow, 

Speak gently, she can hear 
The daisies grow. 
20 



Oscar Wilde 

All her bright golden hair 
Tarnished with rust, 

She that was young and fair 
Fallen to dust. 

Lily-like, white as snow, 

She hardly knew 
She was a woman, so 

Sweetly she grew. 

Coffin-board, heavy stone, 
Lie on her breast; 

I vex my heart alone. 
She is at rest. 

Peace, peace; she cannot hear 

Lyre or sonnet; 
All my life's buried here, 

Heap earth upon it. 



IMPRESSION DU MATIN 

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold 
Changed to a harmony in grey; 
A barge with ochre-coloured hay 

Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold 

The yellow fog came creeping down 
The bridges, till the houses' walls 
Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's 

Loomed like a bubble o'er the town. 
21 



Oscar Wilde 

Then suddenly arose the clang 

Of waking life; the streets were stirred 
With country waggons; and a bird 

Flew to the glistening roofs and sang. 

But one pale woman all alone, 

The daylight kissing her wan hair, 
Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare, 

With lips of flame and heart of stone. 



John Davidson 

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 1857. 
His Ballads and Songs (1895) and Nenu Ballads {1897) at- 
tained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his great 
promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his own 
growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct poetry 
never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is but the 
Universe grown conscious." 

Davidson died by his own hand in 1909. 



A BALLAD OF HELL 

*A letter from my love to-day! 

Oh, unexpected, dear appeal ! * 
She struck a happy tear away, 

And broke the crimson seal. 

* My love, there is no help on earth. 
No help in heaven; the dead-man's bell 

Must toll our wedding; our first hearth 
Must be the well-paved floor of hell.' 

22 



John Davidson 

The colour died from out her face, 
Her eyes like ghostly candles shone; 

She cast dread looks about the place, 

Then clenched her teeth and read right on. 

* I may not pass the prison door ; 

Here must I rot from day to day, 
Unless I wed whom I abhor, 

My cousin, Blanche of Valencay. 

*At midnight with my dagger keen, 
I'll take my life; it must be so. 

Meet me in hell to-night, my queen. 
For weal and woe.* 

She laughed although her face was wan, 

She girded on her golden belt, 
She took her jewelled ivory fan, 

And at her glowing missal knelt. 

Then rose, * And am I mad?' she said: 
She broke her fan, her belt untied ; 

With leather girt herself instead. 
And stuck a dagger at her side. 

She waited, shuddering in her room, 
Till sleep had fallen on all the house. 

She never flinched ; she faced her doom : 
They two must sin to keep their vows. 
23 



John Davidson 

Then out into the night she went, 

And, stooping, crept by hedge and tree; 

Her rose-bush flung a snare of scent, 
And caught a happy memory. 

She fell, and lay a minute's space ; 

She tore the sward in her distress; 
The dewy grass refreshed her face ; 

She rose and ran with lifted dress. 

She started like a morn-caught ghost 
Once when the moon came out and stood 

To watch ; the naked road she crossed, 
And dived into the murmuring wood. 

The branches snatched her streaming cloak; 

A live thing shrieked; she made no stay! 
She hurried tc the tr>'Sting-oak — 

Right well she knew the way. 

Without a pause she bared her breast, 
And drove her dagger home and fell, 

And lay like one that takes her rest, 
And died and wakened up in hell. 

She bathed her spirit in the flame. 
And near the centre took her post; 

From all sides to her ears there came 
The dreary anguish of the lost. 

24 



John Davidson 

The devil started at hei side, 

Comely, and tall, and black as jet. 

* I am young Malespina's bride; 

Has he come hither yet? ' 

* My poppet, welcome to your bed.' 

* Is Malespina here?' 

* Not he ! To-morrow he must wed 

His cousin Blanche, my dear!' 

* You lie, he died with me to-night.' 

* Not he! it was a plot' . . . 'You lie.' 

* My dear, I never lie outright.' 

' We died at midnight, he and I.' 

The devil went. Without a groan 
She, gathered up In one fierce prayer, 

Took root In hell's midst all alone, 
And waited for him there. 

She dared to make herself at home 
Amidst the wail, the uneasy stir. 

The blood-stained flame that filled the dome, 
Scentless and silent, shrouded her. 

How long she stayed I cannot tell ; 

But when she felt his perfidy, 
She marched across the floor of hell ; 

And all the damned stood up to see. 
25 



John Davidson 

The devil stopped her at the brink; 

She shook him off ; she cried, * Away ! * 
* My dear, you have gone mad, I think.' 

' I was betrayed : I will not stay.' 

Across the weltering deep she ran; 

A stranger thing was never seen: 
The damned stood silent to a man ; 

They saw the great gulf set between. 

To her it seemed a meadow fair; 

And flowers sprang up about her feet 
She entered heaven ; she climbed the stair 

And knelt down at the mercy-seat. 

Seraphs and saints with one great voice 
Welcomed that soul that knew not fear. 

Amazed to find it could rejoice. 

Hell raised a hoarse, half-human cheer. 



IMAGINATION 
(From " New Years Eve ") 

There is a dish to hold the sea, 
A brazier to contain the sun, 

A compass for the galaxy,. 

A voice to wake the dead and done ! 
26 



John Davidson 

That minister of ministers, 

Imagination, gathers up 
The undiscovered Universe, 

Like jewels in a jasper cup. 

Its flame can mingle north and south ; 

Its accent with the thunder strive; 
The ruddy sentence of its mouth 

Can make the ancient dead alive. 

The mart of power, the fount of will, 
The form and mould of every star, 

The source and bound of good and ill, 
The key of all the things that are, 

Imagination, new and strange 
In every age, can turn the year; 

Can shift the poles and lightly change 
The mood of men, the world's career. 



William Watson 

William Watson was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, York- 
shire, August 2, 1858. He achieved his first wide success 
through his long and eloquent poems on Wordsworth, Shelley, 
and Tennyson — poems that attempted, and sometimes success- 
fully, to combine the manners of these masters. The Hope of 
the World (1897) contains some of his most characteristic verse. 

It was understood that he would be appointed poet laureate 
upon the death of Alfred Austin. But some of his radical and 
semi-political poems are supposed to have displeased the pow- 

27 



TV i I Ham Watson 

ers at Court, and the honor went to Robert Bridges. His best 
work, which is notable for its dignity and moulded imagina- 
tion, may be found in Selected Poems, published in 1903 by 
John Lane Co. 

ODE IN MAY^ 



Let me go forth, and share 
The overflowing Sun 
With one wise friend, or one 
Better than wise, being fair, 
Where the pewit wheels and dips 
On heights of bracken and h'ng. 
And Earth, unto her leaflet tips, 
Tingles with the Spring. 

What Is so sweet and dear 
As a prosperous morn in May, 
The confident prime of the day. 
And the dauntless youth of the year, 
When nothing that asks for bliss. 
Asking aright, is denied, 
And half of the world a bridegroom Is, 
And half of the world a bride ? 

The Song of Mingling flows, 
Grave, ceremonial, pure, 
As once, from lips that endure, 
The cosmic descant rose, 

1 From The Hope of the World by William Watson. Copy- 
right, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission of 
the publishers. 

28 



William Watson 

When the temporal lord of life, 
Going his golden way, 
Had taken a wondrous maid to wife 
That long had said him nay. 

For of old the Sun, our sire, 
Came wooing the mother of men. 
Earth, that was virginal then, 
Vestal fire to his fire. 
Silent her bosom and coy, 
But the strong god sued and pressed; 
And born of their starry nuptial joy 
Are all that drink of her breast. 

And the triumph of him that begot. 
And the travail of her that bore. 
Behold, they are evermore 
As warp and weft in our lot. 
We are children of splendour and flame. 
Of shuddering, also, and tears. 
Magnificent out of the dust we came. 
And abject from the Spheres. 

O bright irresistible lord, 

We are fruit of Earth's womb, each one. 

And fruit of thy loins, O Sun, 

Whence first was the seed outpoured. 

To thee as our Father we bow, 

Forbidden thy Father to see. 

Who is older and greater than thou, as 

thou 
Art greater and older than we. 
29 



William Watson 

Thou art but as a word of his speech, 
Thou art but as a wave of his hand ; 
Thou art brief as a glitter of sand 
*Twixt tide and tide on his beach ; 
Thou art less than a spark of his fire, 
Or a moment's mood of his soul: 
Thou art lost in the notes on the lips of 

his choir 
That chant the chant of the Whole. 



ESTRANGEMENT ^ 

So, without overt breach, wt fall apart, 
Tacitly sunder — neither you nor I 
Conscious of one intelligible Why, 
And both, from severance, winning equal smart. 
So, with resigned and acquiescent heart, 
Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie, 
I seem to see an alien shade pass by, 
A spirit wherein I have no lot or part. 

Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim. 
From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn 
That June on her triumphal progress goes 
Through arched and bannered woodlands; while 

for him 
She is a legend emptied of concern, 
And idle is the rumour of the rose. 

1 From The Hope of the JVorld by William Watson. Copy- 
right, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission of 
the publishers. 

30 



William Watson 

SONG 

April, April, 

Laugh thy girlish laughter; 
Then, the moment after, 
Weep thy girlish tears, 
April, that mine ears 
Like a lover greetest, 
If I tell thee, sweetest, 
All my hopes and fears. 
April, April, 

Laugh thy golden laughter, 
But, the moment after. 
Weep thy golden tears! 



Francis Thompson 



Born in 1859 at Preston, Francis Thompson was educated at 
Owen's College, Manchester. Later he tried all manner of 
strange ways of earning a living. He was, at various times, 
assistant in a boot-shop, medical student, collector for a book 
seller and homeless vagabond; there was a period in his life 
when he sold matches on the streets of London. He was 
discovered in terrible poverty (having given up everything ex- 
cept poetry and opium) by the editor of a magazine to which 
he had sent some verses the year before. Almost immediately 
thereafter he became famous. His exalted mysticism is seen 
at its purest in " A Fallen Yew" and "The Hound of Heaven." 
Coventry Patmore, the distinguished poet of an earlier period, 
says of the latter poem, which is unfortunately too long to 

31 



Francis Thompson 

quote, " It is one of the very few great odes of which our 
language can boast." 

Thompson died, after a fragile and spasmodic life, in St. 
John's Wood in November, 1907. 

DAISY 



Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 

Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill — 

O breath of the distant surf! — 

The hills look over on the South, 

And southward dreams the sea; 
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand 
Came innocence and she. 

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 
Red for the gatherer springs; 

Two children did we stray and talk 
Wise, idle, childish things. 

She listened with big-lipped surprise, 
Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: 

Her skin was like a grape whose veins 
Run snow instead of wine. 

She knew not those sweet words she spake, 
Nor knew her own sweet way; 

But there's never a bird, so sweet a song 
Thronged in whose throat all day. 
32 



Francis Thompson 

Oh, there were flowers in Storrington 
On the turf and on the spray; 

But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills 
Was the Daisy-flower that day! 

Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. 

She gave me tokens three: — 
A look, a word of her winsome mouth, 

And a wild raspberry. 

A berry red, a guileless look, 

A still word, — strings of sand! 

And yet they made my wild, wild heart 
Fly down to her little hand. 

For standing artless as the air, 

And candid as the skies, 
She took the berries with her hand. 

And the love with her sweet eyes. 

The fairest things have fleetest end. 
Their scent survives their close: 

But the rose's scent is bitterness 
To him that loved the rose. 

She looked a little wistfully, 

Then went her sunshine way: — 

The sea's eye had a mist on it. 

And the leaves fell from the day. 
33 



Francis Thompson 

She went her unremembering way, 
She went and left in me 

The pang of all the partings gone, 
And partings yet to be. 

She left me marvelling why my soul 
Was sad that she was glad ; 

At all the sadness in the sweet, 
The sweetness in the sad. 

Still, still I seemed to see her, still 
Look up with soft replies, 

And take the berries with her hand, 
And the love with her lovely eyes. 

Nothing begins, and nothing ends. 
That is not paid with moan, 

For we are born in other's pain, 
And perish in our own. 



TO OLIVIA 

I fear to love thee, Sweet, because 
Love's the ambassador of loss; 
White flake of childhood, clinging so 
To my soiled raiment, thy shy snow 
At tenderest touch will shrink and go. 
Love me not, delightful child. 
My heart, by many snares beguiled. 
Has grown timorous and wild. 
34 



Francis Thompson 

It would fear thee not at all, 
Wert thou not so harmless-small. 
Because thy arrows, not yet dire, 
Are still unbarbed with destined fire, 
I fear thee more than hadst thou stood 
Full-panoplied in womanhood. 



AN ARAB LOVE-SONG 

The hunched camels of the night ^ 
Trouble the bright 
And silver waters of the moon. 
The Maiden of the Morn will soon 
Through Heaven stray and sing, 
Star gathering. 

Now while the dark about our loves is strewn, 
Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come! 
And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb. 

Leave thy father, leave thy mother 

And thy brother ; 

Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart! 

Am I not thy father and thy brother, 

And thy mother? ^ 

And thou-what needest with thy tribes black 

tents 
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart? 

1 (Cloud-shapes observed by travellers In the East.) 

35 



A. E. Housman 

A, E. Housman was born March 26, 1859, and, after a classi- 
cal education, he was, for ten years, a Higher Division Clerk 
in H. M. Patent Office. Later in life, he became a teacher. 

Housman has published only one volume of original verse, 
but that volume {A Shropshire Lad) is known wherever mod- 
ern English poetry is read. Originally published in 1896, when 
Housman was almost 37, it is evident that many of these lyrics 
were written when the poet was much younger. Echoing the 
frank pessimism of Hardy and the harder cynicism of Heine, 
Housman struck a lighter and more buoyant note. Underneath 
his dark ironies, there is a rustic humor that has many subtle 
variations. From a melodic standpoint, A Shropshire Lad is a 
collection of exquisite, haunting and almost perfect songs. 

Housman has been a professor of Latin since 1892 and, be- 
sides his immortal set of lyrics, has edited Juvenal and the 
books of Manlius. 



REVEILLfi 

Wake: the silver dusk returning 
Up the beach of darkness brims, 

And the ship of sunrise burning 
Strands upon the eastern rims. 

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, 
Trampled to the floor it spanned. 

And the tent of night in tatters 
Straws the sky-pavilioned land. 

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying: 
Hear the drums of morning play; 

Hark, the empty highways crying 
" Who'll beyond the hills away? " 
36 



A. E. Housman 

Towns and countries woo together, 
Forelands beacon, belfries call; 

Never lad that trod on leather 
Lived to feast his heart with all. 

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber 
Sunlit pallets never thrive ; 

Morns abed and daylight slumber 
Were not meant for man alive. 

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; 

Breath's a ware that will not keep. 
Up, lad: when the journey's over 

There'll be time enough to sleep. 



WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY 

When I was one-and-twenty 

I heard a wise man say, 
" Give crowns and pounds and guineas 

But not your heart away; 
Give pearls away and rubies 

But keep your fancy free." 
But I was one-and-twenty, 

No use to talk to me. 

When I was one-and-twenty 

I heard him say again, 
" The heart out of the bosom 

Was never given in vain ; 
37 



A. E. Housman 

'Tfs paid with sighs a-plenty 
And sold for endless rue." 

And I am two-and-twenty, 
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true. 



WITH RUE MY HEART IS LADEN 

With rue my heart is laden 
For golden friends I had, 

For many a rose-lipt maiden 
And many a lightfoot lad. 

By brooks too broad for leaping 
The lightfoot boys are laid; 

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping 
In fields where roses fade. 



TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG 

The time you won your town the race 
We chaired you through the market-place ; 
Man and boy stood cheering by, 
And home we brought you shoulder-high. 

To-day, the road all runners come, 
Shoulder-high we bring you home. 
And set you at your threshold down, 
Townsman of a stiller town. 

38 



A, E. Housman 

Smart lad, to slip betimes away 
From fields where glory does not stay, 
And early though the laurel grows 
It withers quicker than the rose. 

Eyes the shady night has shut 
Cannot see the record cut. 
And silence sounds no worse than cheers 
After earth has stopped the ears: 

Now you will not swell the rout 
Of lads that wore their honours out, 
Runners whom renown outran 
And the name died before the man. 

So set, before Its echoes fade. 
The fleet foot on the sill of shade, 
And hold to the low lintel up 
The still-defended challenge-cup. 

And round that early-laurelled head 
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, 
And find unwithered on its curls 
The garland briefer than a girl's. 



" LOVELIEST OF TREES " 

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now 
Is hung with bloom along the bough. 
And stands about the woodland ride 
Wearing white for Eastertide. 
39 



A. E. Housman 

Now, of my threescore years and ten, 
Twenty will not come again, 
And take from seventy springs a score, 
It only leaves me fifty more. 

And since to look at things in bloom 
Fifty springs are little room, 
About the woodlands I will go 
To see the cherry hung with snow. 

Douglas Hyde 

Doctor Douglas Hyde was born in Roscommon County, Ire- 
land in, as nearly as can be ascertained, i860. One of the 
most brilliant Irish scholars of his day, he has worked inde- 
fatigably for the cause of his native letters. He has written a 
comprehensive history of Irish literature; has compiled, edited 
and translated into English the Love Songs of Connaiight; is 
President of The Irish National Literary Society; and is the 
author of innumerable poems in Gaelic — far more than he ever 
wrote in English. His collections of Irish folk-lore and poetry 
were among the most notable contributions to the Celtic revival; 
they were (see Preface), to a large extent, responsible for it. 
Since 1909 he has been Professor of Modern Irish in University 
Collge, Dublin. 

The poem which is here quoted is one of his many brilliant 
and reanimating translations. In its music and its peculiar 
rhyme-scheme, it reproduces the peculiar flavor as well as the 
meter of the West Irish original. 

I SHALL NOT DIE FOR THEE 

For thee, I shall not die, 

Woman of high fame and name; 

Foolish men thou maj^est slay 
I and they are not the same. 
40 



Douglas Hyde 

Why should I expire 

For the fire of an eye, 
Slender waist or swan-like limb, 

Is't for them that I should die? 

The round breasts, the fresh skin. 

Cheeks crimson, hair so long and rich; 

Indeed, indeed, I shall not die. 
Please God, not I, for any such. 

The golden hair, the forehead thin, 
The chaste mien, the gracious ease, 

The rounded heel, the languid tone, — 
Fools alone find death from these. 

Thy sharp wit, thy perfect calm, 
Thy thin palm like foam o' the sea; 

Thy white neck, thy blue eye, 
I shall not die for thee. 

Woman, graceful as the swan, 

A wise man did nurture me. 
Little palm, white neck, bright eye, 

I shall not die for ye. 



Amy Levy 

Amy Levy, a singularly gifted Jewess, was born at Clapham, 
in 1861. A fiery young poet, she burdened her own intensity 
with the sorrows of her race. She wrote one novel, Reuben 

41 



Amy Levy 

Sachs, and two volumes of poetry — the more distinctive of the 
two being half-pathetically and half-ironically entitled A Minor 
Poet (1884). After several years of brooding introspection, 
she committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 28. 



EPITAPH 

{On a commonplace person who died in bed) 

This is the end of him, here he lies: 
The dust In his throat, the worm In his eyes, 
The mould In his mouth, the turf on his breast; 
This Is the end of him, this is best. 
He will never He on his couch awake, 
Wide-eyed, tearless, till dim daybreak. 
Never again will he smile and smile 
When his heart Is breaking all the while. 
He will never stretch out his hands in vain 
Groping and groping — never again. 
Never ask for bread, get a stone instead, 
Never pretend that the stone is bread; 
Nor sway and sway 'twixt the false and true, 
Weighing and noting the long hours through. 
Never ache and ache with the choked-up sighs; 
This is the end of him, here he lies. 

IN THE MILE END ROAD 

How like her! But 'tis she herself, 
Comes up the crowded street, 

How little did I think, the morn, 
My only love to meet! 
42 



Amy Levy 

Who else that motion and that mien ? 

Whose else that airy tread? 
For one strange moment I forgot 

My only love was dead. 



Katharine Tynan Hinkson 

Katharine Tynan was born at Dublin in 1861, and educated 
at the Convent of St. Catherine at Drogheda. She married 
Henry Hinkson, a lawyer and author, in 1893. Her poetry is 
largely actuated by religious themes, and much of her verse is 
devotional and yet distinctive. In Neiu Poems (1911) she is 
at her best; graceful, meditative and with occasional notes of 
deep pathos. 



SHEEP AND LAMBS 

All in the April morning, 
April airs were abroad; 

The sheep with their little lambs 
Pass'd me by on the road. 

The sheep with their little lambs 
Pass'd me by on the road ; 

All in an April evening 

I thought on the Lamb of God. 

The lambs were weary, and crying 
With a weak human cry; 

I thought on the Lamb of God 
Going meekly to die. 
43 



Katharine Tynan Hinkson 

Up in the blue, blue mountains 
Dewy pastures are sweet: 

Rest for the little bodies, 
Rest for the little feet. 

Rest for the Lamb of God 
Up on the hill-top green; 

Only a cross of shame 

Two stark crosses between. 

All in the April evening, 

April airs were abroad; 
I saw the sheep with their lambs. 

And thought on the Lamb of God. 



ALL-SOULS 

The door of Heaven is on the latch 
To-night, and many a one is fain 

To go home for one's night's watch 
With his love again. 

Oh, where the father and mother sit 

There's a drift of dead leaves at the door 
Like pitter-patter of little feet 
That come no more. 

Their thoughts are in the night and cold, 
Their tears are heavier than the clay, 

But who is this at the threshold 
So young and gay? 

44 



Katharine Tynan Hinkson 

They are come from the land o' the young, 
They have forgotten how to weep ; 

Words of comfort on the tongue, 
And a kiss to keep. 

They sit down and they stay awhile, 
Kisses and comfort none shall lack; 

At morn they steal forth with a smile 
And a long look back. 



Owen Seaman 

One of the most delightful of English versifiers, Owen Sea- 
man, was born in 1861. After receiving a classical education, 
he became Professor of Literature and began to write for 
Punch in 1894. In 1906 he was made editor of that interna- 
tionally famous weekly, remaining in that capacity ever since. 
He was knighted in 1914. As a writer of light verse and as a 
parodist, his agile work has delighted a generation of admir- 
ers. Some of his most adroit lines may be found in his In Cap 
and Bells (1902) and The Battle of the Bays (1892). 



TO AN OLD FOGEY 

{JVho Contends that Christmas is Played Out) 

O frankly bald and obviously stout! 

And so you find that Christmas as a fete 
Dispassionately viewed, is getting out 
Of date. 
45 



Owen Seaman 

The studied festal air is overdone; 

The humour of it grows a little thin ; 
You fail, in fact, to gather where the fun 
Comes in. 

Visions of very heavy meals arise 

That tend to make your organism shiver; 
Roast beef that irks, and pies that agonise 
The liver; 

Those pies at which you annually wince, 

Hearing the tale how happy months will follow 
Proportioned to the total mass of mince 
You swallow. 

Visions of youth whose reverence is scant, 

Who with the brutal verve of boyhood's prime 
Insist on being taken to the pant- 
-omime. 

Of infants, sitting up extremely late, 

Who run you on toboggans down the stair; 
Or make you fetch a rug and simulate 
A bear. 

This takes your faultless trousers at the knees, 

The other hurts them rather more behind ; 
And both effect a fracture in your ease 
Of mind. 

46 



Owen Seaman 

My good dyspeptic, this will never do; 

Your weary withers must be sadly wrung! 
Yet once I well believe that even you 
Were young. 

Time was when you devoured, like other boys, 

Plum-pudding sequent on a turkey-hen; 
With cracker-mottos hinting of the joys 
Of men. 

Time was when 'mid the maidens you would pull 

The fiery raisin with profound delight; 
When sprigs of mistletoe seemed beautiful 
And right. 

Old Christmas changes not! Long, long ago 

He won the treasure of eternal youth ; 

Yours is the dotage — if you want to know 

The truth. 

Come, now, I'll cure your case, and ask no fee: — 

Make others' happiness this once your own ; 
All else may pass: that joy can never be 
Outgrown ! 



THOMAS OF THE LIGHT HEART 

Facing the guns, he jokes as well 
As any Judge upon the Bench; 

Between the crash of shell and shell 
His laughter rings along the trench; 
47 



Owen Seaman 

He seems immensely tickled by a 
Projectile while he calls a " Black Maria." 

He whistles down the day-long road, 
And, when the chilly shadows fall 

And heavier hangs the weary load. 
Is he down-hearted? Not at all. 

'Tis then he takes a light and airy 

View of the tedious route to Tipperary.^ 

His songs are not exactly hymns; 

He never learned them in the choir; 
And yet they brace his dragging limbs 

Although they miss the sacred fire; 
Although his choice and cherished gems 
Do not include " The Watch upon the 
Thames." 

He takes to fighting as a game; 

He does no talking, through his hat, 
Of holy missions; all the same 

He has his faith — be sure of that; 
He'll not disgrace his sporting breed. 
Nor play what isn't cricket. There's his 
creed. 

1 " It's a long <way to Tipperary," the most popular song of 
the Allied armies during the World's War. 



48 



Henry Newbolt 

Henry Newbolt was born at Bilston in 1862. His early work 
was frankly imitative of Tennyson; he even attempted to add 
to the Arthurian legends with a drama in blank verse entitled 
Mordred (1895). It was not until he wrote his sea-ballads 
that he struck his own note. With the publication of Admirals 
All (1897) his fame was widespread. The popularity of his 
lines was due not so much to the subject-matter of Newbolt's 
verse as to the breeziness of his music, the solid beat of rhythm, 
the vigorous swing of his stanzas. 

In 1898 Newbolt published The Island Race, which contains 
about thirty more of his buoyant songs of the sea. Besides 
being a poet, Newbolt has written many essays and his critical 
volume, A Neiv Study of English Poetry (1917), is a collection 
of articles that are both analytical and alive. 

DRAKE'S DRUM 

Drake he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?) 
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships, 

Wi* sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, 
An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin' 

He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago. 

Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe, 
" Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore. 

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 

An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed 
them long ago." 

49 



Henry Newbolt 

Drake he's in his hammock till the great Armadas come, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
Slung atween the round shot, listenin' for the drum, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, 

Call him when ye sail to meet the foe; 
Where the old trade's plyin' an' the old flag flyin', 

They shall find him, ware an' wakin', as they found 
him long ago. 



Arthur Symons 

Born in 1865, Arthur Symons' first few publications revealed 
an intellectual rather than an emotional passion. Those vol- 
umes were full of the artifice of the period, but Symons's tech- 
nical skill and frequent analysis often saved the poems from 
complete decadence. His later books are less imitative; the 
influence of Verlaine and Baudelaire is not so apparent; the 
sophistication is less cynical, the sensuousness more restrained. 
His various collections of essays and stories reflect the same 
peculiar blend of rich intellectuality and perfumed romanticism 
that one finds in his most characteristic poems. 

Of his many volumes in prose, Spiritual Adventures (1905), 
while obviously influenced by Walter Pater, is by far the most 
original ; a truly unique volume of psychological short stories. 
The best of his poetry up to 1902 was collected in two volumes. 
Poems, published by John Lane Co. The Fool of the World 
appeared in 1907, 



IN THE WOOD OF FINVARA 

I have grown tired of sorrow and human tears ; 
Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, 
A naked runner lost in a storm of spears. 

50 



Arthur Symons 

I have grown tired of rapture and love's desire ; 
Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire 
Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy 
fire. 

I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green 

flood; 
Here between sea and sea, in the fairy wood, 
I have found a delicate, wave-green solitude. 

Here, in the fairy wood, between sea and sea, 
I have heard the song of a fairy bird in a tree, 
And the peace that is not in the world has flown 
to me. 



MODERN BEAUTY 

I am the torch, she saith, and what to me 
If the moth die of me? I am the flame 
Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see 
Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame. 
But live with that clear light of perfect fire 
Which is to men the death of their desire. 

I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen 
Troy burn, and the most loving knight lie dead. 
The world has been my mirror, time has been 
My breath upon the glass; and men have said, 
Age after age, in rapture and despair. 
Love's poor few words, before my image there. 

51 



Arthur Symons 

I live, and am immortal ; in my eyes 

The sorrow of the world, and on my lips 

The joy of life, mingle to make me wise; 

Yet now the day is darkened with eclipse: 

Who is there still lives for beauty? Still am I 

The torch, but where 's the moth that still dares die? 



William Butler Yeats 

Born at Sandymount, Dublin, in 1865, the son of John B. 
Yeats, the Irish artist, the greater part of William Butler 
Yeats' childhood was spent in Sligo. Here he became imbued 
with the power and richness of native folk-lore; he drank in the 
racy quality through the quaint fairy stories and old wives' 
tales of the Irish peasantry. (Later he published a collection 
of these same stories.) 

It was in the activities of a " Young Ireland " society that 
Yeats became identified with the new spirit; he dreamed of a 
national poetry that would be written in English and yet would 
be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of the 
leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for the 
cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though his 
mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather than a 
Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be full of a 
haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) The Hour 
Glass (1904), his second volume of "Plays for an Irish 
Theatre," includes his best one-act dramas with the exception 
of his unforgettable The Land of Heart's Desire (1894). The 
Wind Among the Reeds (1899) contains several of his most 
beautiful and characteristic poems. 

Others who followed Yeats have intensified the Irish drama; 
they have established a closer contact between the peasant and 
poet. No one, however, has had so great a part in the shaping 
of modern drama in Ireland as Yeats. His Deirdre (1907), a 
beautiful retelling of the great Gaelic legend, is far more dra- 
matic than the earlier plays; it is particularly interesting to 

52 



/^ 



William Butler Yeats 

read with Synge's more idiomatic play on the same theme, 
Deirdre of the Sorronvs. 

The poems of Yeats which are quoted here reveal him in 
his most lyric and musical vein. 



THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innlsfree, 
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made ; 
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, 
And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes 

dropping slow, 
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the 

cricket sings; 
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 
And evening full of the linnet's wings. 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore ; 
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
I hear it in the deep heart's core. 



THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER 

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow 
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow. 
And then I must scrub, and bake, and sweep, 
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep; 
53 



William Butler Yeats 

But the young lie long and dream in their bed 

Of the matching of ribbons, the blue and the red, 

And their day goes over in idleness, 

And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress. 

While I must work, because I am old 

And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold. 



THE CAP AND BELLS 

A Queen was beloved by a jester, 
And once when the owls grew still 

He made his soul go upward 
And stand on her window sill. 

In a long and straight blue garment, 
It talked before morn was white, 

And it had grown wise by thinking 
Of a footfall hushed and light. 

But the young queen would not listen ; 

She rose in her pale nightgown. 
She drew in the brightening casement 

And pushed the brass bolt down. 

He bade his heart go to her. 

When the bats cried out no more, 

In a red and quivering garment 
It sang to her through the door. 
54 



William Butler Yeats 

The tongue of it sweet with dreaming 

Of a flutter of flower-like hair, 
But she took up her fan from the table 

And waved it off on the air. 

* I've cap and bells,' he pondered, 
* I will send them to her and die.' 

And as soon as the morn had whitened 
He left them where she went by. 

She laid them upon her bosom, 

Under a cloud of her hair. 
And her red lips sang them a love song. 

The stars grew out of the air. 

She opened her door and her window, 
And the heart and the soul came through, 

To her right hand came the red one. 
To her left hand came the blue. 

They set up a noise like crickets, 

A chattering wise and sweet, 
And her hair was a folded flower, 

And the quiet of love her feet. 



AN OLD SONG RESUNG 

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; 
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. 
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; 
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree. 

55 



William Butler Yeats 

In a field by the river my love and I did stand, 
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. 
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; 
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. 



Rudyard Kipling 

Born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865, Rudyard Kipling, 
the author of a dozen contemporary classics, was educated in 
England. He returned, however, to India and took a position 
on the staff of "The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette," 
writing for the Indian press until about 1890, when he went to 
England, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of 
a short sojourn in America. 

Even while he was still in India he achieved a popular as 
well as a literary success with his dramatic and skilful tales, 
sketches and ballads of Anglo-Indian life. 

Soldiers Three (1888) was the first of six collections of short 
stories brought out in " Wheeler's Railway Library." They 
were followed by the far more sensitive and searching Plain 
Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars and The Phantom 
'Rikshaiv, which contains two of the best and most convincing 
ghost-stories in recent literature. 

These tales, however, display only one side of Kipling's ex- 
traordinary talents. As a writer of children's stories, he has 
few living equals. Wee Willie Winkie, which contains that 
stirring and heroic fragment " Drums of the Fore and Aft," is 
only a trifle less notable than his more obviously juvenile col- 
lections. Just-So Stories and the two Jungle Books (prose 
interspersed with lively rhymes) are classics for young people 
of all ages. Kim, the novel of a super-Mowgli grown up, 
is a more mature masterpiece. 

Considered solely as a poet (see Preface) he is one of the 
most vigorous and unique figures of his time. The spirit of 
romance surges under his realities. His brisk lines conjure up 
the tang of a countryside in autumn, the tingle of salt spray, 
the rude sentiment of ruder natures, the snapping of a banner, 

S6 



Rudyard Kipling 

the lurch and rumble of the sea. His poetry is woven of the 
stuff of myths; but it never loses its hold on actualities. Kip- 
ling himself in his poem "The Benefactors" (from The Years 
Between [1919]) writes: 

Ah! What avails the classic bent 

And what the cultured word, 
Against the undoctored incident 
That actually occurred? 

Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His 
varied poems have finally been collected in a remarkable one- 
volume Inclusive Edition (1885-1918), an indispensable part of 
any student's library. This gifted and prolific creator, whose 
work was affected by the war, has frequently lapsed into bora- 
bast and a journalistic imperialism. At his best he is unfor- 
gettable, standing mountain-high above his host of imitators. 
His home is at Burwash, Sussex. 

GUNGA DIN 

You may talk o' gin an' beer 

When you're quartered safe out 'ere, 

An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; 

But if it comes to slaughter 

You will do your work on water, 

An* you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's 

got it. 
Now in Injia's sunny clime. 
Where I used to spend my time 
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen, 
Of all them black-faced crew 
The finest man I knew 
Was our regimental bhisti^ Gunga Din. 
1 The bkisti, or water-carrier, attached to regiments in India, 

is often one of the most devoted of the Queen's servants. He is 

also appreciated by the men. 

57 



Rudyard Kipling 

It was "Din! Din! Din! 

You limping lump o' brick-dust, Gunga 

Din! 
Hi! slippy hitherao! 
Water, get it! Panee laol^ 
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din ! " 

The uniform 'e wore 

Was nothin' much before. 

An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind. 

For a twisty piece o' rag 

An' a goatskin water-bag 

Was all the field-equipment 'e could find. 

When the sweatin' troop-train lay 

In a sidin' through the day. 

Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eye- 
brows crawl, 

We shouted '' Harry By! " ^ 

Till our throats were bricky-dry, 

Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve 
us all. 

It was "Din! Din! Din! 

You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you 

been? 
You put some juldee ^ in It, 
Or I'll marrow^ you this minute, 
If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga 

DIn!'» 

1 Bring water swiftly. 3 Speed. 

2 Tommy Atkins* equivalent for " O Brother! " "* Hit you. 

58 



Rudyard Kipling 

'E would dot an* carry one 

Till the longest day was done, 

An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear. 

If we charged or broke or cut, 

You could bet your bloomin' nut, 

'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear. 

With 'is mussick ^ on 'is back, 

'E would skip with our attack. 

An' watch us till the bugles made " Retire." 

An' for all 'is dirty 'ide, 

'E was white, clear white, inside 

When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire ! 

It was "Din! Din! Din!" 

With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on 

the green. 
When the cartridges ran out, 
You could 'ear the front-files shout: 
"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga 

Din!" 

I sha'n't forgit the night 

When I dropped be'ind the fight 

With a bullet where my belt-plate should 

'a' been. 
I was chokin' mad with thirst. 
An' the man that spied me first 
Was our gobd old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga 

Din. 

1 Water-skin. 
59 



Rudyard Kipling 

*E lifted up my 'ead, 

An* *e plugged me where I bled, 

An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o* water — green ; 

It was crawlln' an' It stunk, 

But of all the drinks I've drunk, 

I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. 



It was " Din ! Din ! Din ! 

'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 

'is spleen ; 
'E's chawin' up the ground an' 'e's 

kickin' all around: 
For Gawd's sake, git the water, Gunga 

Din!" 



'E carried me away 

To where a dooli lay, 

An* a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean. 

'E put me safe inside, 

An* just before *e died: 

" I 'ope you liked your drink," sez Gunga 

Din. 
So I'll meet 'im later on 
In the place where 'e is gone — 
Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 
*E'll be squattin' on the coals 
Givin' drink to pore damned souls. 
An' I'll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din! 
60 



Rudyard Kipling 

Din! Din! Din! 

You Lazarushlan-leather Gunga Din! 
Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you, 
By the llvin' Gawd that made you, 
You're a better man than I am, Gunga 
Din! 



THE RETURN 1 

Peace Is declared, and I return 

To 'Ackneystadt, but not the same; 
Things 'ave transpired which made me learn 

The size and meanin' of the game. 
I did no more than others did, 

I don't know where the change began; 
I started as a average kid, 

I finished as a thinkin' man. 

// England was what England seems 
An not the England of our dreams. 
But only putty, brass, an paint, 

'Ow quick we'd drop 'er! But she ain't! 

Before my gappin' mouth could speak 

I 'eard it in my comrade's tone ; 
I saw it on my neighbour's cheek 

Before I felt it flush my own. 

1 From The Five Nations by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright by 
Doubleday, Page & Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 

6l 



Rudyard Kipling 

An* last it come to me — not pride, 

Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
(If such a term may be applied). 

The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 

Rivers at night that cluck an' jeer. 

Plains which the moonshine turns to sea, 
Mountains that never let yo\i near, 

An' stars to all eternity; 
An' the quick-breathin' dark that fills 

The 'oUows of the wilderness, 
When the wind worries through the 'ills — 

These may 'ave taught me more or less. 

Towns without people, ten times took, 

An' ten times left an' burned at last; 
An' starvin' dogs that come to look 

For owners when a column passed; 
An' quiet, 'omesick talks betvveen 

Men, met by night, you never knew 
Until — 'is face — by shellfire seen — 

Once — an' struck off. They taught me, too. 

The day's lay-out — the mornin' sun 

Beneath your 'at-brim as you sight; 
The dinner-'ush from noon till one, 

An' the full roar that lasts till night; 
An' the pore dead that look so old 

An' was so young an hour ago. 
An' legs tied down before they're cold — 

These are the things which make you know. 
62 



Rudyard Kipling 

Also Time runnin' into years — 

A thousand Places left be'ind — 
An' Men from both two 'emispheres 

Discussin' things of every kind; 
So much more near than I 'ad known, 

So much more great than I 'ad guessed — 
An' me, like all the rest, alone — 

But reachin' out to all the rest! 

So 'ath it come to me — not pride, 

Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
(If such a term may be applied). 

The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 
But now, discharged, I fall away 

To do with little things again. . . . 
Gawd, 'oo knows all I cannot say, 

Look after me in Thamesf ontein ! 

// England was what England seems 
An not the England of our dreams, 

But only putty, brass, an paint, 

'Ow quick wed chuck Vr/ But she ain't! 

THE CONUNDRUM OF THE WORKSHOPS 

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's 

green and gold, 
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with 

a stick in the mold ; 

63 



Rudyard Kipling 

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was 

joy to his mighty heart, 
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves : " It's pretty, 

but is it Art?" 

Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion 

his work anew — 
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most 

dread review; 
And he left his lore to the use of his sons — and that was 

a glorious gain 
When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of 

the branded Cain. 

They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the 

stars apart, 
Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: " It's striking, 

but is it Art?" 
The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle 

derrick swung, 
While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in 

an alien tongue. 

They fought and they talked in the north and the south, 

they talked and they fought in the west, 
Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor 

Red Clay had rest — 
Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove 

was preened to start. 
And the Devil bubbled below the keel : " It's human, but 

is it Art?" 

64 



Rudyard Kipling 

The tale Is old as the Eden Tree — as new as the new- 
cut tooth — 

For each man knows ere his li'p-thatch grows he is 
master of Art and Truth; 

And each man hears as the twilight nearc, to the beat of 
his dying heart, 

The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, 
but was it Art?" 

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape 

of a surplice-peg, 
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk 

of an addled egg, 
We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse 

is drawn by the cart; 
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: " It's clever, 

but is it Art?" 

W^ien the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club- 
room's green and gold. 

The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their 
pens in the mold — 

They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, 
and the ink and the anguish start 

When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, 
but is it art? " 

Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four 

great rivers flow. 
And the wTeath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it 

long ago, 

65 



Rudyard Kipling 

And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly 

scurry through, 
By the favor of God we might know as much — as our 

father Adam knew. 



AN ASTROLOGER'S SONG ^ 

To the Heavens above us 

O look and behold 
The Planets that love us 

All harnessed in gold! 
What chariots, what horses 

Against us shall bide 
While the Stars in their courses 

Do fight on our side ? 

All thought, all desires, 

That are under the sun, 
Are one with their fires. 

As we also are one: 
All matter, all spirit. 

All fashion, all frame, 
Receive and inherit 

Their strength from the same. 

(Oh, man that deniest 

All power save thine own, 
Their power in the highest 

Is mightily shown. 

1 From Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. Copy- 
right by Doubleday, Page and Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 

66 



Rudyard Kipling 

Not less in the lowest 
That power is made clear. 

Oh, man, if thou knowest, 
What treasure is here!) 

Earth quakes in her throes 

And we wonder for why ! 
But the blind planet knows 

When her ruler is nigh ; 
And, attuned since Creation 

To perfect accord, 
She thrills in her station 

And yearns to her Lord. 

The waters have risen, 

The springs are unbound. — 
The floods break their prison. 

And ravin around. 
No rampart withstands 'em, 

Their fury will last, 
Till the Sign that commands 'em 

Sinks low or swings past. 

Through abysses unproven 

And gulfs beyond thought, 
Our portion is woven, 

Our burden is brought. 
Yet They that prepare it. 

Whose Nature we share, 
Make us who must bear it 

Well able to bear. 
67 



Rudyard Kipling 

Though terrors overtake us 

We'll not be afraid. 
No power can unmake us 

Save that which has made. 
Nor yet beyond reason 

Or hope shall we fall — 
All things have their season, 

And Mercy crowns all ! 

Then, doubt not, ye fearful — 

The Eternal Is King — 
Up, heart, and be cheerful, 

And lustily sing: — 
What chariots, what horses 

Against us shall bide 
While the Stars in their courses 

Do fight on our side? 



Richard Le Gallienne 

Richard Le Gallienne, who, in spite of his long residence in 
the United States, must be considered an English poet, was born 
at Liverpool in i866. He entered on a business career soon 
after leaving Liverpool College, but gave up commercial life 
to become a man of letters after five or six years. 

His early work was strongly influenced by the artificialities 
of the aesthetic movement ("see Preface) ; the indebtedness to 
Oscar Wilde is especially evident. A little later Keats was the 
dominant influence, and E7iglish Poems (1892) betray how deep 
were Le Gallienne's admirations. His more recent poems in 
The Lonely Dancer (1913) show a keener individuality and a 
finer lyrical passion. His prose fancies are well known — par- 

68 



Richard Le Gallienne 

ticularly The Booh Bills of Narcissus and the charming and 
high-spirited fantasia, The Quest of the Golden Girl. 

Le Gallienne came to America about 1905 and has lived ever 
since in Rowayton, Conn., and New York City. 



A BALLAD OF LONDON 

Ah, London ! London ! our delight, 
Great flower that opens but at night, 
Great City of the midnight sun, 
Whose day begins when day is done. 

Lamp after lamp against the sky 
Opens a sudden beaming eye, 
Leaping alight on either hand, 
The iron lilies of the Strand. 

Like dragonflies, the hansoms hover. 
With jeweled eyes, to catch the lover; 
The streets are full of lights and loves, 
Soft gowns, and flutter of soiled doves. 

The human moths about the light 
Dash and cling close in dazed delight, 
And burn and laugh, the world and wife, 
For this is London, this is life! 

Upon thy petals butterflies, 
But at thy root, some say, there lies, 
A world of weeping trodden things, 
Poor worms that have not eyes or wings. 
69 



Richard Le Gallienne 

From out corruption of their woe 
Springs this bright flower that charms us sa, 
Men die and rot deep out of sight 
To keep this jungle-flower bright. 

Paris and London, World-Flowers twain 
Wherewith the World-Tree blooms again, 
Since Time hath gathered Babylon, 
And withered Rome still withers on. 

Sidon and Tyre were such as ye, 
How bright they shone upon the tree! 
But Time hath gathered, both are gone. 
And no man sails to Babylon. 



REGRET 

One asked of regret, 

And I made reply: 
To have held the bird, 

And let it fly; 
To have seen the star 

For a moment nigh, 
And lost it 

Through a slothful eye ; 
To have plucked the flower 

And cast it by; 
To have one only hope — 

To die. 

70 



Lionel Johnson 

Born in 1867, Lionel Johnson received a classical education 
at Oxford, and his poetry is a faithful reflection of his studies 
in Greek and Latin literatures. Though he allied himself with 
the modern Irish poets, his Celtic origin is a literary myth; 
Johnson, having been converted to Catholicism in 1891, became 
imbued with Catholic and, later, with Irish traditions. His 
verse, while sometimes strained and over-decorated, is chastely 
designed, rich and, like that of the Cavalier poets of the seven- 
tenth century, mystically devotional. Poems (1895) contains his 
best work. Johnson died in 1902. 



MYSTIC AND CAVALIER 

Go from me : I am one of those who fall. 
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all, 
In my sad company? Before the end, 
Go from me, dear my friend ! 

Yours are the victories of light: your feet 
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet: 
But after warfare in a mourning gloom, 
I rest in clouds of doom. 

Have you not read so, looking in these eyes? 
Is it the common light of the pure skies. 
Lights up their shadowy depths? The end is set: 
Though the end be not yet. 

When gracious music stirs, and all is bright, 
And beauty triumphs through a courtly night; 
When I too joy, a man like other men : 
Yet, am I like them, then? 

71 



Lionel Johnson 

And In the battle, when the horsemen sweep 
Against a thousand deaths, and fall on sleep: 
Who ever sought that sudden calm, if I 
Sought not? yet could not die! 

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere: 
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear? 
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds, 
Dimness and airy shrouds. 

Beneath, what angels are at work? What powers 
Prepare the secret of the fatal hours? 
See ! the mists tremble, and the clouds are stirred : 
When comes the calling word ? 

The clouds are breaking from the crystal ball, 
Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall. 
When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep, 
My spirit may have sleep. 

O rich and sounding voices of the air! 
Interpreters and prophets of despair: 
Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come. 
To make with you mine home. 



72 



Lionel Johnson 



TO A TRAVELLER 

The mountains, and the lonely death at last 
Upon the lonely mountains: O strong friend! 
The wandering over, and the labour passed, 

Thou art indeed at rest: 

Earth gave thee of her best, 

That labour and this end. 

Earth was thy mother, and her true son thou: 
Earth called thee to a knowledge of her ways. 
Upon the great hills, up the great streams: now 

Upon earth's kindly breast 

Thou art indeed at rest: 

Thou, and thine arduous days. 

Fare thee well, O strong heart! The tranquil night 
Looks calmly on thee: and the sun pours down 
His glory over thee, O heart of might! 
Earth gives thee perfect rest: 
Earth, whom thy swift feet pressed: 
Earth, whom the vast stars crown. 

Ernest Dowson 

Ernest Dowson was born at Belmont Hill^ in Kent in 1867. 
His great-uncle was Alfred Domett (Brownmgs Warmg ), 
who was at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand Dowson 
practically an invalid all his life, was reckless with himself 

73 



Ernest Dowson 

and, as disease weakened him more and more, hid himself in 
miserable surroundings; for almost two years he lived in sordid 
supper-houses known as "cabmen's shelters." He literally 
drank himself to death. 

His delicate and fantastic poetry was an attempt to escape 
from a reality too big and brutal for him. His passionate lyric, 
"I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion," a 
triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which 
Dowson epitomized himself — " One of the greatest lyrical poems 
of our time," writes Arthur Symons, " in it he has for once said 
everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and perhaps 
immortal music." 

Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern 
minor poets. His life was the tragedy of a weak nature buf- 
feted by a strong and merciless environment. 



TO ONE IN BEDLAM 

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars, 
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine; 
1 hose scentless wisps of straw that, miserable, line 
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull w^orld stares. 

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars 
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine 
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine, 
And make his melancholy germane to the stars'? 

O lamentable brother! if those pity thee. 
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me; 
Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap, 
All their days, vanity? Better then mortal flowers. 
Thy moon-kissed roses seem : better than love or sleep, 
The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours! 

74 



Ernest Dowson 



YOU WOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD ME 

You would have understood me, had you waited ; 

I could have loved you, dear! as well as he: 
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated 
Always to disagree. 

What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter; 
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid. 
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter, 
Shall I reproach you, dead? 

Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover 

All the old anger, setting us apart: 
Always, in all, in truth was I your lover; 
Always, I held your heart. 

I have met other women who were tender. 

As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare. 
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender, 
I who had found you fair? 

Had we been patient, dear I ah, had you waited, 

I had fought death for you, better than he: 
But from the very first, dear! we were fated 
Always to disagree. 

Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses 

Love that in life was not to be our part: 
On your low lying mound between the roses. 
Sadly I cast my heart. 

75 



Ernest Dowson 

I would not waken you : nay ! this is fitter ; 

Death and the darkness give you unto me; 
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter, 
Hardly can disagree. 

"A. E." 

{George William Russell) 

At Durgan, a tiny town in the north of Ireland, George 
William Russell was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when 
he was 10 years old and, as a young man, helped to form 
the group that gave rise to the Irish Renascence — the group of 
which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas Hyde, Katharine 
Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Besides 
being a splendid mystical poet, " A. E." is a painter of note, 
a fiery patriot, a distinguished sociologist, a public speaker, a 
student of economics and one of the heads of the Irish Agri- 
cultural Association. 

The best of his poetry is in Homeivard Songs by the Way 
(1894) and The Earth Breath and Other Poems. Yeats has 
spoken of these poems as " revealing in all things a kind of 
scented flame consuming them from within." 

THE GREAT BREATH 

Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose, 
Withers once more the old blue flower of day: 
There where the ether like a diamond glows, 
Its petals fade away. 

A shadowy tumult stirs the dusky air; 
Sparkle the delicate dews, the distant snows; 
The great deep thrills — for through it everywhere 
The breath of Beauty blows. 

76 



ff 



I saw how all the trembling ages past, 
Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath, 
Near'd to the hour when Beauty breathes her last 
And knows herself in death. 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 

Far up the dim twilight fluttered 
Moth-wings of vapour and flame: 

The lights danced over the mountains, 
Star after star they came. 

The lights grew thicker unheeded, 
For silent and still were we ; 

Our hearts were drunk with a beauty 
Our eyes could never see. 



Stephen Phillips 

Born in 1868, Stephen Phillips is best known as the author of 
Herod (1900), Paola and Francesca (1899), and Ulysses 
(1902); a poetic playwright who succeeded in reviving, for a 
brief interval, the blank verse drama on the modern stage. 
Hailed at first with extravagant and almost mcredible praise, 
Phillips lived to see his most popular dramas discarded and 
his new ones, such as Pietro of Siena (1910), unproduced and 

unnoticed. . , , „^ t.^ ,ttoc 

Phillips failed to "restore" poetic drama because he was 
first of all, a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. In spi e ot 
certain moments of rhetorical splendor, his scenes ^^e ^P^f f^"^ 
lar instead of emotional; his inspiration is too often derived 
from other models. He died in 1915. 

77 



Stephen Phillips 

FRAGMENT FROM " HEROD " 

Herod speaks: 

I dreamed last night of a dome of beaten gold 

To be a counter-glory to the Sun. 

There shall the eagle blindly dash himself, 

There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon 

Shall aim all night her argent archery; 

And it shall be the tryst of sundered stars, 

The haunt of dead and dreaming Solomon; 

Shall send a light upon the lost in Hell, 

And flashings upon faces without hope. — 

And I will think in gold and dream in silver, 

Imagine in marble and conceive in bronze, 

Till it shall dazzle pilgrim nations 

And stammering tribes from undiscovered lands, 

Allure the living God out of the bliss, 

And all the streaming seraphim from heaven. 

BEAUTIFUL LIE THE DEAD 

Beautiful lie the dead; 

Clear comes each feature ; 
Satisfied not to be, 

Strangely contented. 

Like ships, the anchor dropped. 

Furled every sail is; 
Mirrored with all their masts 

In a deep water. 

78 



'; Stephen Phillips 

^ A DREAM 

My dead love came to me, and said : 
* God gives me one hour's rest, 

To spend with thee on earth again: 
How shall we spend it best ? ' 

* Why, as of old,* I said ; and so 

We quarrelled, as of old: 
But, when I turned to make my peace, 

That one short hour was told. 

Laurence Binyon 

Laurence Binyon was born at Lancaster, August lo, 1869, a 
cousin of Stephen Phillips; in Primavera (1890) their early 
poems appeared together. Binyon's subsequent volumes showed 
little distinction until he published London Visions, which, in an 
enlarged edition in 1908, revealed a gift of characterization 
and a turn of speech in surprising contrast to his previous 
academic Lyrical Poems (1894). ^is Odes (1901) contains his 
ripest work; two poems in particular, "The Threshold" and 
" The Bacchanal of Alexander," are glowing and unusually 
spontaneous. 

Binyon's power has continued to grow; age has given his 
verse a new sharpness. " The House That Was," one of his 
most recent poems, appeared in The London Mercury, Novem- 
ber, 1919. 

A SONG 

For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth, 
There is no measure upon earth. 
Nay, they wither, root and stem, 
If an end be set to them. 
79 



Laurence Binyon 

Overbrim and overflow, 
If you own heart you would know; 
For the spirit born to bless 
Lives but in its own excess. 



THE HOUSE THAT WAS 

Of the old house, only a few crumbled 

Courses of brick, smothered in nettle and dock, 
Or a squared stone, lying mossy where it tumbled ! 

Sprawling bramble and saucy thistle mock 
What once was firelit floor and private charm 

Where, seen in a windowed picture, hills w^ere fading 
At dusk, and all was memory-coloured and warm, 

And voices talked, secure from the wind's invading. 

Of the old garden, only a stray shining 

Of daffodil flames amid April's cuckoo-flowers. 
Or a cluster of aconite mixt with weeds entwining! 

But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers 
By homely thorns; whether the white rain drifts 

Or sun scorches, he holds the downs in ken, 
The western vale; his branchy tiers he lifts, 

Older than many a generation of men. * 

Alfred Douglas 

Lord Alfred Douglas was born in 1870 and educated at 
Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the editor of The Acad- 
emy from 1907 to 1910 and was at one time the intimate friend 

80 



Alfred Douglas 

of Oscar Wilde. One of the minor poets of *' the eighteen-nlne- 
ties," several of his poems rise above his own affectations and 
the end-of-the-century decadence. The City of the Soul (1899) 
and Sonnets (1900) contain his most graceful writing. 



THE GREEN RIVER 

I know a green grass path that leaves the field 
And, like a running river, winds along 
Into a leafy wood, where is no throng 

Of birds at noon-day; and no soft throats yield 

Their music to the moon. The place is sealed, 
An unclaimed sovereignty of voiceless song, 
And all the unravished silences belong 

To some sweet singer lost, or unrevealed. 

So is my soul become a silent place. . . . 
Oh, may I wake from this uneasy night 

To find some voice of music manifold. 
Let it be shape of sorrow with wan face. 

Or love that swoons on sleep, or else delight 
That is as wide-eyed as a marigold. 



T. Sturge Moore 

Thomas Sturge Moore was born March 4, 1870. He is well 
known not only as an author, but as a critic and wood-en- 
graver. As an artist, he has achieved no little distinction and 
has designed the covers for the poetry of W. B. Yeats and 
others. As a poet, the greater portion of his verse is severely 
classical in tone, academic in expression but, of its kind, dis- 

81 



T, Sturge Moore 

tinctive and intimate. Among his many volumes, the most 
outstanding are The Vinedresser and Other Poems (1899), A 
Sicilian Idyll (1911) and The Sea Is Kind (1914). 



THE DYING SWAN 

O silver-throated Swan 

Struck, struck! A golden dart 

Clean through thy breast has gone 

Home to thy heart. 

Thrill, thrill, O silver throat! 

O silver trumpet, pour 

Love for defiance back 

On him vi^ho smote ! 

And brim, brim o'er 

With love; and ruby-dye thy track 

Down thy last living reach 

Of river, sail the golden light — 

Enter the sun's heart — even teach 

O wondrous-gifted Pain, teach Thou 

The God of love, let him learn how ! 

SILENCE SINGS 

So faint, no ear is sure it hears, 
So faint and far; 
So vast that very near appears 
My voice, both here and in each star 
Unmeasured leagues do bridge between ; 
Like that which on a face is seen 
Where secrets are; 
82 



T, Sturge Moore 

Sweeping, like veils of lofty balm, 
Tresses unbound 
O'er desert sand, o'er ocean calm, 
I am wherever is not sound ; 
And, goddess of the truthful face, 
My beauty doth instil its grace 
That joy abound. 



William H. Davie s 

According to his own biography, William H. Davies was 
born in a public-house called Church House at Newport, in 
the County of Monmouthshire, April 20, 1870, of Welsh parents. 
He was, until Bernard Shaw " discovered " him, a cattleman, a 
berry-picker, a panhandler — in short, a vagabond. In a preface 
to Davies' second book. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp 
(1906), Shaw describes how the manuscript came into his 
hands: 

" In the year 1905 I received by post a volume of poems 
by one William H. Davies, whose address was The Farm 
House, Kensington, S. E. I was surprised to learn that there 
was still a farmhouse left in Kensington; for I did not then 
suspect that the Farm House, like the Shepherdess Walks and 
Nightingale Lane and Whetstone Parks of Bethnal Green and 
Holborn, is so called nowadays in irony, and is, in fact, a 
doss-house, or hostelry, where single men can have a night's 
lodging, for, at most, sixpence. . . . The author, as far as I 
could guess, had walked into a printer's or stationer's shop; 
handed in his manuscript; and ordered his book as he might 
have ordered a pair of boots. It was marked * price, half a 
crown.' An accompanying letter asked me very civilly if I 
required a half-crown book of verses; and if so, would I 
please send the author the half crown: if not, would I return 
the book. This was attractively simple and sensible. I opened 

83 



William H. Davie s 

the book, and was more puzzled than ever; for before I had 
read three lines I perceived that the author was a real poet. 
His work was not in the least strenuous or modern; there was 
indeed no sign of his ever having read anything otherwise than 
as a child reads. . . . Here, I saw, was a genuine innocent, 
writing odds and ends of verse about odds and ends of things; 
living quite out of the world in which such things are usually 
done, and knowing no better (or rather no worse) than to get 
his book made by the appropriate craftsman and hawk it round 
like any other ware." 

It is more than likely that Davies' first notoriety as a tramp- 
poet who had ridden the rails in the United States and had 
had his right foot cut off by a train in Canada, obscured his 
merits as a genuine singer. Even his early The Soul's Destroyer 
(1907) revealed that simplicity which is as naif as it is 
strange. The volumes that followed are more clearly melo- 
dious, more like the visionary wonder of Blake, more artistically 
artless. 

With the exception of "The Villain," which has not yet ap- 
peared in book form, the following poems are taken from The 
Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (1916) with the permission 
of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. 



DAYS TOO SHORT 

When primroses are out in Spring, 

And small, blue violets come between; 
When merry birds sing on boughs green, 

And rills, as soon as born, must sing; 

When butterflies will make side-leaps, 
As though escaped from Nature's hand 
Ere perfect quite ; and bees will stand 

Upon their heads in fragrant deeps; 

84 



William H. Davies 

When small clouds are so silvery white 
Each seems a broken rimmed moon — 
When such things are, this world too soon, 

For me, doth wear the veil of Night. 



THE MOON 

Thy beauty haunts me heart and soul, 
Oh, thou fair Moon, so close and bright; 

Thy beauty makes me like the child 
That cries aloud to own thy light: 

The little child that lifts each arm 

To press thee to her bosom warm. 

Though there are birds that sing this night 
With thy white beams across their throats, 

Let my deep silence speak for me 

More than for them their sweetest notes: 

Who worships thee till music fails, 

Is greater than thy nightingales. 



THE VILLAIN 

While joy gave clouds the light of stars. 
That beamed where'er they looked ; 

And calves and lambs had tottering knees, 
Excited, while they sucked; 
85 



William H. Davies 

While every bird enjoyed his song, 
Without one thought of harm or wrong- 
I turned my head and saw the wind, 

Not far from where I stood, 
Dragging the corn by her golden hair, 

Into a dark and lonely wood. 



THE EXAMPLE 

Here's an example from 

A Butterfly; 
That on a rough, hard rock 

Happy can lie; 
Friendless and all alone 
On this unsweetened stone. 

Now let my bed be hard, 

No care take I ; 
I'll make my joy like this 

Small Butterfly; 
Whose happy heart has power 
To make a stone a flower. 



Hi I aire Belloc 

Hilaire Belloc, who has been described as " a Frenchman, an 
Englishman, an Oxford man, a country gentleman, a soldier, a 
satirist, a democrat, a novelist, and a practical journalist," 
was born July 27, 1870. After leaving school he served as a 

86 



Hilaire Belloc 

driver in the 8th Regiment of French Artillery at Toul Meurthe- 
et-Moselle, being at that time a French citizen. He was natural- 
ized as a British subject somewhat later, and in 1906 he entered 
the House of Commons as Liberal Member for South Salford. 
As an author, he has engaged in multiple activities. He has 
written three satirical novels, one of which, Mr. Clutierbuck's 
Election, sharply exposes British newspapers and underground 
politics. His Path to Rome (1902) is a high-spirited and ever- 
deliglitful travel book which has passed through many editions. 
His historical studies and biographies of Robespierre and Marie 
Antoinette (1909) are classics of their kind. As a poet he is 
only somewhat less engaging. His Verses (1910) is a rather 
brief collection of poems on a wide variety of themes. Although 
his humorous and burlesque stanzas are refreshing, Belloc is 
most himself when he writes either of malt liquor or his beloved 
Sussex. Though his religious poems are full of a fine romanti- 
cism, " The South Country " is the most pictorial and persua- 
sive of his serious poems. His poetic as well as his spiritual 
kinship with G. K. Chesterton is obvious. 



THE SOUTH COUNTRY 

When I am living in the Midlands 

That are sodden and unkind, 
I light my lamp in the evening: 

My work is left behind; 
And the great hills of the South Country 

Come back into my mind. 

The great hills of the South Country 

They stand along the sea ; 
And it's there vi^alking in the high woods 

That I could wish to be, 
And the men that were boys when I was a boy 

Walking along with me. 

87 



Hilaire Belloc 

The men that live in North England 

I saw them for a day: 
Their hearts are set upon the waste fells, 

Their skies are fast and grey; 
From their castle-walls a man may see 

The mountains far away. 

The men that live in West England 

They see the Severn strong, 
A-rolling on rough water brown 

Light aspen leaves along. 
They have the secret of the Rocks, 

And the oldest kind of song. 

But the men that live in the South Country 

Are the kindest and most wise. 
They get their laughter from the loud surf, 

And the faith in their happy eyes 
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring 

When over the sea she flies; 
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet. 

She blesses us with surprise. 

I never get between the pines 

But I smell the Sussex air; 
Nor I never come on a belt of sand 

But my home is there. 
And along the sky the line of the Downs 

So noble and so bare. 
88 



Hilaire Belloc 

A lost thing could I never find, 

Nor a broken thing mend: 
And I fear I shall be all alone 

When I get towards the end. 
Who will there be to comfort me 

Or who will be my friend? 

I will gather and carefully make my friends 
Of the men of the Sussex Weald; 

They watch the stars from silent folds, 
They stiffly plough the field. 

By them and the God of the South Country 
My poor soul shall be healed. 

If I ever become a rich man, 

Or if ever I grow to be old, 
I will build a house with deep thatch 

To shelter me from the cold. 
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung 

And the story of Sussex told. 

I will hold my house in the high wood 

Within a walk of the sea, 
And the men that were boys when I was a boy 

Shall sit and drink with me. 



Anthony C. Deane 

Anthony C. Deane was born in 1870 and was the Seatonian 
prizeman in 1905 at Clare College, Cambndge He h^as been 
Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, since 1916. His long 

89 



Anthony C. Deane 

list of light verse and essays includes several excellent paro- 
dies, the most delightful being found in his Neix) Rhymes for 
Old (1901). 



THE BALLAD OF THE BILLYCOCK 

It was the good ship Billycock, with thirteen men aboard, 
Athirst to grapple with their country's foes, — 

A crew, 'twill be admitted, not numerically fitted 
To navigate a battleship in prose. 

It was the good ship Billycock put out from Plymouth 
Sound, 
While lustily the gallant heroes cheered, 
And all the air was ringing with the merry bo'sun's sing- 
ing, 
Till in the gloom of night she disappeared. 

But when the morning broke on her, behold, a dozen 
ships, 

A dozen ships of France around her lay, 
(Or, if that isn't plenty, I will gladly make it twenty). 

And hemmed her close in Salamander Bay. 

Then to the Lord High Admiral there spake a cabin-boy: 
" Methinks," he said, " the odds are somewhat great. 

And, in the present crisis, a cabin-boy's advice is 
That you and France had better arbitrate! " 

90 



Anthony C. Deane 

"Pooh!" said the Lord High Admiral, and slapped his 
manly chest, 

" Pooh ! That would be both cowardly and wrong ; 
Shall I, a gallant fighter, give the needy ballad-writer 

No suitable material for song? " 

" Nay — is the shorthand-writer here? — I tell you, one and 
all, 
I mean to do my duty, as I ought; 
With eager satisfaction let us clear the decks for action 
' And fight the craven Frenchmen ! " So they fought. 

And (after several stanzas which as yet are incomplete, 

Describing all the fight in epic style) 
When the Billycock was going, she'd a dozen prizes 
towing 

(Or twenty, as above) in single file! 

Ah, long in glowing English hearts the story will remain, 

The memory of that historic day. 
And, while we rule the ocean, we will picture with 
emotion 

The Billycock in Salamander Bay! 

P.S. — I've lately noticed that the critics — who, I think, 

In praising my productions are remiss — 
Quite easily are captured, and profess themselves en- 
raptured. 
By patriotic ditties such as this, 

91 



Anthony C. Deane 

For making which you merely take some dauntless Eng- 
lishmen, 

Guns, heroism, slaughter, and a fleet — 
Ingredients you mingle in a metre with a jingle, 

And there you have your masterpiece complete! 

Why, then, with labour infinite, produce a book of verse 
To languish on the ** All for Twopence " shelf? 

The ballad bold and breezy comes particularly easy — 
I mean to take to writing it myself! 



A RUSTIC SONG 

Oh, I be vun of the useful troibe 

O' rustic volk, I be; 
And writin' gennelmen dii descroibe 

The doin's o' such as we; 
I don't knaw mooch o' corliflower plants, 

I can't tell 'oes from trowels, 
But 'ear me mix ma consonants. 

An' moodle oop all ma vowels! 

I talks in a wunnerful dialect 

That vew can hunderstand, 
'Tis Yorkshire-Zummerzet, I expect, 

With a dash o' the Oirish brand ; 
Sometimes a bloomin' flower of speech 

I picks from Cockney spots, 
And when releegious truths I teach, 

Obsairve ma richt gude Scots! 
92 



Anthony C. Deane 

In most of the bukes, *twas once the case 

I 'adn't got much to do, 
I blessed the 'erolne's purty face, 

An' I seed the 'ero through ; 
But now, Vm julst a pairsonage! 

A power o' bukes there be 
Which from the start to the very last page 

Entoirely deal with me! 

The wit or the point o' what I spakes 

YeVe got to find if ye can ; 
A wunnerful difference spellln' makes 

In the 'ands of a competent man! 
I mayn't knaw mooch o' corliflower plants, 

I mayn't knaw 'oes from trowels. 
But I does ma wark, if ma consonants 

Be properly mixed with ma vowels! 



/. M. Synge 

" The most brilliant star of the Celtic revival was born at 
Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in 1871. As a child in Wicklow, 
he was already fascinated by the strange idioms and the rhyth- 
mic speech he heard there, a native utterance which was his 
greatest delight and which was to be rich material for his great- 
est work. He did not use this folk-language merely as he 
heard it. He was an artist first and last, and as an artist 
he bent and shaped the rough material, selecting with great 
fastidiousness, so that in his plays every speech is, as he himself 
declared all good speech should be, " as fully flavored as a 
nut or apple." Even in The Tinker's Wedding (1907), pos- 

93 



7. M. Synge 

sibly the least important of his plays, one is arrested by 
snatches like: 

"That's a sweet tongue you have, Sarah Casey; but if 
sleep's a grand thing, it's a grand thing to be waking up 
a day the like of this, when there's a warm sun in it, and 
a kind air, and you'll hear the cuckoos singing and crying 
out on the top of the hill." 

For some time, Synge's career was uncertain. He went to 
Germany half intending to become a professional musician. 
There he studied the theory of music, perfecting himself mean- 
while in Gaelic and Hebrew, winning prizes in both of these 
languages. Yeats found him in France in 1898 and advised 
him to go to the Aran Islands, to live there as if he were one 
of the people. " Express a life," said Yeats, ** that has never 
found expression." Synge went. He became part of the life 
of Aran, living upon salt fish and eggs, talking Irish for the 
most part but listening also to that beautiful English which, 
to quote Yeats again, " has grown up in Irish-speaking dis- 
tricts and takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of 
the translators of the Bible, but its idiom and vivid metaphor 
from Irish." The result of this close contact was five of the 
greatest poetic prose dramas not only of his own generation, 
but of several generations preceding it. (See Preface.) 

In Riders to the Sea (1903), The Well of the Saints (1905), 
and The Playboy of the IVestern World (1907) we have a 
richness of imagery, a new language startling in its vigor, a 
wildness and passion that contrast strangely with the suave 
mysticism and delicate spirituality of his associates in the Irish 
Theatre. 

Synge's Poems and Translations (1910), a volume which was 
not issued until after his death, contains not only his few hard 
and earthy verses, but also Synge's theory of poetry. The 
translations, which have been rendered in a highly intensified 
prose, are aa racy as anything in his plays; his versions of 
Villon and Petrarch are remarkable for their adherence to the 
original and still radiate the poet's own personality. 

Synge died, just as he was beginning to attain fame, at a 
private hospital in Dublin March 24, 1909. 

94 



/. M. Synge 

BEG-INNISH 

Bring Kateeri-beug and Maurya Jude 
To dance in Beg-Innish,^ 
And when the lads (they're in Dunquin) 
Have sold their crabs and fish, 
Wave fawny shawls and call them in, 
And call the little girls who spin, 
And seven weavers from Dunquin, 
To dance in Beg-Innish. 

I'll play you jigs, and Maurice Kean, 

Where nets are laid to dry, 

I've silken strings would draw a dance 

From girls are lame or shy; 

Four strings I've brought from Spain and 

France 
To make your long men skip and prance. 
Till stars look out to see the dance 
Where nets are laid to dry. 

We'll have no priest or peeler in 
To dance in Beg-Innish; 
But we'll have drink from M'riarty Jim 
Rowed round while gannets fish, 
A keg with porter to the brim. 
That every lad may have his whim. 
Till we up sails with M'riarty Jim 
And sail from Beg-Innish. 

1 (The accent is on the last syllable.) 

95 



J. M, Synge 

A TRANSLATION FROM PETRARCH 

(He is Jealous of the Heavens and the Earth) 

What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms 
about her, and is holding that face away from me, where 
I was finding peace from great sadness. 

What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are 
after taking her, and shutting her in with greediness, the 
Heavens that do push their bolt against so many. 

What a grudge I am bearing the blessed saints that 
have got her sweet company, that I am always seeking; 
and what a grudge I am bearing against Death, that is 
standing in her two eyes, and will not call me with a 
word. 

TO THE OAKS OF GLENCREE 

My arms are round you, and I lean 
Against you, while the lark 
Sings over us, and golden lights, and green 
Shadows are on your bark. 

There'll come a season when you'll stretch 
Black boards to cover me; 
Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch, 
With worms eternally. 

96 



'Nora Hopper Chesson 

Nora Hopper was born in Exeter on January 2, 1871, and 
married W. H. Chesson, a well-known writer, in 1901. Al- 
though the Irish element in her work is acquired and incidental, 
there is a distinct if somewhat fitful race consciousness in Bal- 
lads in Prose (1894) and Under Quickened Boughs (1896). 
She died suddenly April 14, 1906. 



A CONNAUGHT LAMENT 

I will arise and go hence to the west, 

And dig me a grave where the hill-winds call ; 

But O were I dead, were I dust, the fall 

Of my own love's footstep would break my rest! 

My heart in my bosom is black as a sloe! 
I heed not cuckoo, nor wren, nor swallow: 
Like a flying leaf in the sky's blue hollow 
The heart in my breast is, that beats so low. 

Because of the words your lips have spoken, 
(O dear black head that I must not follow) 
My heart is a grave that is stripped and hollow, 
As ice on the water my heart is broken. 

lips forgetful and kindness fickle. 

The swallow goes south with you : I go west 
Where fields are empty and scythes at rest. 

1 am the poppy and you the sickle ; 
My heart is broken within my breast. 

97 



Eva Gore-Booth 

Eva Gore-Booth, the second daughter of Sir Henry Gore- 
Booth and the sister of Countess Marcievicz, was born in Sligo, 
Ireland, in 1872. She first appeared in "A. E." 's anthology, 
Neiv Songs, in which so many of the modern Irish poets first 
came forward. 

Her initial volume, Poems (1898), showed practically no dis- 
tinction — not even the customary " promise." But The One and 
the Many (1904) and The Sorroivful Princess (1907) revealed 
the gift of the Celtic singer who is half mystic, half minstrel. 
Primarily philosophic, her verse often turns to lyrics as haunt- 
ing as the two examples here reprinted. 



THE WAVES OF BREFFNY 

The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the 
sea, 
And there is traffic on it and many a horse and cart, 
But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me 
And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through 
my heart. 

A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o'er the hill, 
And there is glory in it ; and terror on the wind : 

But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, 
And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. 

The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their 
way, 
Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal ; 
But the little waves of Brelfny have drenched my heart 
in spray, 
And the little waves of Breffny go stumbling through 
my soul. 

98 



Eva Gore-Booth 

WALLS 

Free to all souls the hidden beauty calls, 

The sea thrift dwelling on her spray-swept height, 

The lofty rose, the low-grown aconite, 

The gliding river and the stream that brawls 

Down the sharp cliffs with constant breaks and fall 

All these are equal in the equal light — 

All waters mirror the one Infinite. 

God made a garden, it was men built walls; 
But the wide sea from men is wholly freed ; 
Freely the great waves rise and storm and break, 
Nor softlier go for any landlord's need, 
Wherq rhythmic tides flow for no miser's sake 
And none hath profit of the brown sea-weed. 
But all things give themselves, yet none may take. 

Moira O'Neill 

Moira O'Neill is known chiefly by a remarkable little collec- 
tion of only twenty-five lyrics, Songs from the Glens of Antrim 
(1900), simple tunes as unaffected as the peasants of whom 
she sings. The best of her poetry is dramatic without being 
theatrical; melodious without falling into the tinkle of most 
" popular " sentimental verse. 

A BROKEN SONG 

' Where am I from?' From the green hills of Erin. 
'Have I no song then?' My songs are all sung. 
' What my love?* Tis alone I am farin'. 
Old grows my heart, an' my voice yet is young. 

99 



Moira O'Neill 

* If she was tall? * Like a king's own daughter. 
' If she was fair? * Like a mornin' o' May. 
When she'd come laughin' 'twas the runnin' wather, 
When she'd come blushin' 'twas the break o' day. 

' Where did she dwell? ' Where one'st I had my dwellin'. 
' Who loved her best? * There's no one now will know. 
' Where is she gone?* Och, why would I be tellin'! 
Where she is gone there I can never go. 



BEAUTY'S A FLOWER 

Youth's for an hour. 

Beauty s a flower. 

But love is the jewel that wins the world. 

Youth's for an hour, an' the taste o' life is sweet, 

Ailes was a girl that stepped on two bare feet ; 

In all my days I never seen the one as fair as she, 

I'd have lost my life for Ailes, an' she never cared for me. 

Beauty's a flower, an' the days o' life are long. 
There's little knowin' who may live to sing another song; 
For Ailes was the fairest, but another is my wife, 
An* Mary — God be good to her! — is all I love in life. 

Youth's for an hour, 
Beauty's a flower. 

But love is the jewel that wins the world. 
lOO 



John McCrae 

John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 1872. 
He was graduated in arts in 1894 and in medicine in 1898. He 
finished his studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and returned 
to Canada, joining the stall of the Medical School of McGill 
University. He was a lieutenant of artillery in South Africa 
(1899-1900) and was in charge of the Medical Division of the 
McGill Canadian General Hospital during the World War. 
After serving two years, he died of pneumonia, January, 1918, 
his volume In Flanders Fields (1919) appearing posthumously. 

Few who read the title poem of his book, possibly the most 
widely-read poem produced by the war, realize that it is a 
perfect rondeau, one of the loveliest (and strictest) of the 
French forms. 



IN FLANDERS FIELDS 

In Flanders fields the popples blow 
Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place ; and in the sky 
The larks, still bravely singing, fly 
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead. Short days ago 
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 
Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 
To you from failing hands we throw 
The torch; be yours to hold it high. 
If ye break faith with us who die 
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 
In Flanders fields. 
lOI 



Ford Madox Hueffer 

Ford Madox Hueffer was born in 1873 and is best known as 
the author of many novels, two of which, Romance and The 
Inheritors, were written in collaboration with Joseph Conrad. 
He has written also several critical studies, those on Rossetti 
and Henry James being the most notable. His On Heaven and 
Other Poems appeared in 1916. 



CLAIR DE LUNE 



I should like to imagine 

A moonlight in which there would be no machine- 
guns! 

For, it is possible 

To come out of a trench or a hut or a tent or a 

church all in ruins: 
To see the black perspective of long avenues 
All silent. 

The white strips of sky 
At the sides, cut by the poplar trunks : 
The white strips of sky 
Above, diminishing — 
The silence and blackness of the avenue 
Enclosed by immensities of space 
Spreading away 
Over No Man's Land. . . . 

For a minute . . . 
For ten . . . 
There will be no sitar shells 
But the untroubled stars, 

102 



Ford Mad ox Hueffer 

There will be no Very light 
But the light of the quiet moon 
Like a swan. 
And silence. ... 

Then, far away to the right thro' the moonbeams 

" Wukka Wukka " will go the machine-guns, 

And, far away to the left 

Wukka Wukka, 

And sharply, 

Wuk . , . Wuk . . . and then silence 

For a space in the clear of the moon. 



II 

I should like to imagine 

A moonlight in which the machine-guns of trouble 

Will be silent. . . . 

Do you remember, my dear, 

Long ago, on the cliffs, in the moonlight, 

Looking over to Flatholme 

We sat . . . Long ago! . . . 

And the things that you told me . . . 

Little things in the clear of the moon, 

The little, sad things of a life. . . . 

We shall do it again 
Full surely. 

Sitting still, looking over at Flatholme. 

103 



Ford Madox Hueffer 

Then, far away to the right 

Shall sound the Machine Guns of trouble 

IVukka-wukka! 

And, far away to the left, under Flatholme, 

Wukka-wuk! . . . 

I wonder, my dear, can you stick it? 
As we should say: " Stick it, the Welch! " 
In the dark of the moon. 
Going over. . . . 



^* THERE SHALL BE MORE JOY . . 

The little angels of Heaven 
Each wear a long white dress, 
And in the tall arcadings 
Play ball and play at chess; 

With never a soil on their garments. 
Not a sigh the whole day long, 
Not a bitter note in their pleasure, 
Not a bitter note in their song. 

But they shall know keener pleasure, 
And they shall know joy more rare — 
Keener, keener pleasure 
When you, my dear, come there. 



104 



Ford Mad ox Hueffer 

The little angels of Heaven 
Each wear a long white gown, 
And they lean over the ramparts 
Waiting and looking down. 



Walter De la Mare 

The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contem- 
porary poetry, Walter De la Mare, was born in 1873. Al- 
though he did not begin to bring out his work in book form 
until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has written, 
" the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer even for 
children, understanding and perceiving as a child." De la 
Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses 
thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace 
that is remarkable in its universality. " In a few words, seem- 
ingly artless and unsought" (to quote Williams again), "he 
can express a pathos or a hope as wide as man's life." 

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in Peacock 
Pie (1913) he surprises us again and again by transforming 
what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrill- 
ing snatch of music. A score of times he takes things as casual 
as the feeding of chickens or the swallowing of physic, berry- 
picking, eating, hair-cutting — and turns them into magic. These 
poems read like lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by 
Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the ordinary in whim- 
sical colors, of catching the commonplace off its guard, is the 
first of De la Mare's two magics. 

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the 
fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our conscious- 
ness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the best of 
De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and 
mystery seem soaked in the lines, and a cool wind from No- 
where blows over them. That most magical of modern verses, 
"The Listeners," and the brief music of "An Epitaph" are 
two fine examples among many. In the first of these poems 

105 



Walter De la Mare 

there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, 
the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the nar- 
rative itself — the less than half-told adventure of some new 
Childe Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. 
Never have silence and black night been reproduced more 
creepily, nor has the symbolism of man's courage facing the 
cryptic riddle of life been more memorably expressed. 

De la Mare's chief distinction, however, lies not so much 
in what he says as in how he says it; he can even take out- 
worn words like " thridding," " athwart," " amaranthine " and 
make them live again in a poetry that is of no time and of 
all time. He writes, it has been said, as much for antiquity as 
for posterity; he is a poet who is distinctively in the world 
and yet not wholly of it. 



^ THE LISTENERS 

* Is there anybody there ? ' said the Traveller, 

Knocking on the moonlit door; 
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 

Of the forest's ferny floor. 
And a bird flew up out of the turret, 

Above the Traveller's head: 
And he smote upon the door again a second time; 

* Is there anybody there ? ' he said. 
But no one descended to the Traveller; 

No head from the leaf-fringed sill 
Leaned over and looked Into his grey eyes, 

Where he stood perplexed and still. 
But only a host of phantom listeners 

That dwelt in the lone house then 
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 

To that voice from the world of men: 

1 06 



Walter De la Mare 

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark 
stair, 

That goes down to the empty hall, 
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken 

By the lonely Traveller's call. 
And he felt in his heart their strangeness, 

Their stillness answering his cry, 
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 

'Neath the starred and leafy sky; 
For he suddenly smote on the door, even 

Louder, and lifted his head :^— 
* Tell them I came, and no one answered, 

That I kept my word,' he said. 
Never the least stir made the listeners. 

Though every word he spake 
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still 
house 

From the one man left awake: 
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup. 

And the sound of iron on stone, 
And how the silence surged softly backward. 

When the plunging hoofs were gone. 



AN EPITAPH 

Here lies a most beautiful lady, 
Light of step and heart was she ; 
I think she was the most beautiful lady 
That ever was in the West Country. 
107 



Walter De la Mare 

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; 
However rare — rare it be; 
And when I crumble, who will remember 
This lady of the West Country? 

TIRED TIM 

Poor tired Tim ! It's sad for him. 

He lags the long bright morning through, 

Ever so tired of nothing to do; 

He moons and mopes the livelong day, 

Nothing to think about, nothing to say; 

Up to bed with his candle to creep, 

Too tired to yawn; too tired to sleep; 

Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him. 



OLD SUSAN 

When Susan's work was done, she'd sit 
With one fat guttering candle lit, 
And window opened wide to win 
The sweet night air to enter in; 
There, with a thumb to keep her place 
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face. 
Her mild eyes gliding very slow 
Across the letters to and fro. 
While wagged the guttering candle flame 
In the wind that through the window came. 
io8 



Walter De la Mare 

And sometimes in the silence she 
Would mumble a sentence audibly, 
Or shake her head as if to say, 
' You silly souls, to act this way ! ' 
And never a sound from night I'd hear, 
Unless some far-off cock crowed clear ; 
Or her old shuffling thumb should turn 
Another page; and rapt and stern, 

Through her great glasses bent on me 

She'd glance into reality; 

And shake her round old silvery head, 

\Yith — ' You ! — I thought you was in bed ! '- 

Only to tilt her book again, 

And rooted in Romance remain. 



NOD 

Softly along the road of evening. 

In a twilight dim with rose, 
Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew 

Old Nod, the shepherd, goes. 

His drowsy flock streams on before him, 
Their fleeces charged with gold. 

To where the sun's last beam leans low 
On Nod the shepherd's fold. 

The hedge is quick and green with briar. 
From their sand the conies creep; 

And all the birds that fly in heaven 
Flock singing home to sleep. 
109 



Walter De la Mare 

His lambs outnumber a noon's roses, 
Yet, when night's shadows fall, 

His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon, 
Misses not one of all. 

His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, 
The waters of no-more-pain ; 

His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, 
" Rest, rest, and rest again." 



G. K, Chesterton 

This brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and ly- 
ricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, 
Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing 
books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a 
writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and every- 
thing, like Tremendous Trifles (1909), Varied Types (1905), 
zn& All Things Considered (1910). But he is also a stimulat- 
ing critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume Heretics (1905) 
and his analytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles Dick- 
ens, and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and gro- 
tesque romances like The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1906), 
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), which Chesterton him- 
self has subtitled "A Nightmare," and The Flying Inn (1914) ; 
the author of several books of fantastic short stories, ranging 
from the wildly whimsical narratives in The Club of Queer 
Trades (1905) to that amazing sequence The Innocence of 
Father Broivn (1911) — which is a series of religious detective 
stories! 

Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds 
time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, 
a lay preacher in disguise (witness Orthodoxy [1908], Whafs 
Wrong ivith the World? [1910], The Ball and the Cross 

1 10 



G. K. Chesterton 

[1909]) a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, 
The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), a collection of 
quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by The 
Ballad of the White Horse (1911), one long poem which, in 
spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is pos- 
sibly the most stirring creation he has achieved. This poem 
has the swing, the vigor, the spontaneity, and, above all, the 
ageless simplicity of the true narrative ballad. 

Scarcely less notable is the ringing " Lepanto " from his later 
Poems (1915) which, anticipating the banging, clanging verses 
of Vachel Lindsay's " The Congo," is one of the finest of mod- 
ern chants. It is interesting to see how the syllables beat, as 
though on brass; it is thrilling to feel how, in one's pulses, the 
armies sing, the feet tramp, the drums snarl, and all the tides 
of marching crusaders roll out of lines like: 

" Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
Don John of Austria is going to the war; 
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold; 
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums. 
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he 
comes. ..." 

Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of a 
skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more likely 
to outlive it. 

LEPANTO 1 

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 

And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 

There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all 

men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard ; 

* From Poems by G. K. Chesterton. Copyright by the John 
Lane Co. and reprinted by permission of the publishers. 

Ill 



G. K, Chesterton 

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. 
They have dared the white republics up the capes of 

Italy, 
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, 
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and 

loss. 
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about 

the Cross. 
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; 
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; 
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, 
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the 

sun. 

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard. 

Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has 

stirred, 
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, 
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, 
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has 

sung, 
That once went singing southward when all the world 

was young. 
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid. 
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. 
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
Don John of Austria is going to the war, 
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, 

112 



G. K, Chesterton 

Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, 

Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, 

and he comes. 
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, 
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world. 
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. 
Love-light of Spain — hurrah! 
Death-light of Africa! 
Don John of Austria 
Is riding to the sea. 

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, 
{Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees. 
His turban that is w^oven of the sunsets and the seas. 
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, 
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the 

trees ; 
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to 

bring 
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. 
Giants and the Genii, 
Multiplex of wing and eye, 
Whose strong obedience broke the sky 
When Solomon was king. 

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the 

mom, 
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their 

eyes in scorn; 

113 



G. K. Chesterton 

They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of 

the sea 
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless crea- 
tures be, 
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests 

curl, 
Splashed w^ith a splendid sickness, the sickness of the 

pearl ; 
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of 

the ground, — 
They gather and they wonder and give worship to 

Mahound. 
And he saith, " Break up the mountains where the her- 
mit-folk can hide. 
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint 

abide, 
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving 

rest, 
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the 

west. 
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, 
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things 

done. 
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I 

know 
The voice that shook our palaces — four hundred years 

ago; 
It is he that saith not * Kismet * ; it is he that knows not 

Fate ; 
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! 

114 



G. K, Chesterton 

It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager 

worth, 
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the 

earth." 
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, 
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 
Sudden and still — hurrah! 
Bolt from Iberia! 
Don John of Austria 
Is gone by Alcalar. j 

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the 

north 
{Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) 
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift 
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift. 
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of 

stone ; 
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone 

alone ; 
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching 

eyes. 
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, 
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, 
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face 

of doom. 
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee, — 
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. 
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse 
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, 

115 



G. K. Chesterton 

Trumpet that sayeth haf 

Domino gloria! 
Don John of Austria 
Is shouting to the ships. 

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck 

{Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.) 

The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft 

as sin, 
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. 
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, 
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon. 
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey 
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from 

the day, 
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, 
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk. 
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed — 
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid. 
Gun upon gun, ha! ha! 
Gun upon gun, hurrah! 
Don John of Austria 
Has loosed the cannonade. 

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, 

(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) 

The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the 

year, 
The secret window whence the world looks small and 
very dear. 

ii6 



G. K, Chesterton 

He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea 
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; 
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and 

Castle dark, 
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; 
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded 

chiefs. 
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudi- 
nous griefs, 
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race 

repines 
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. 
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of 

morning hung 
The stair- ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was 

young. 
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or 

fleeing on 
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon. 
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell 
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of 

his cell, 
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more* a 

sign — 
{But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line I) 
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, 
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop, 
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, 
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds. 
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea 
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. 

117 



G. K, Chesterton 

Vivat Hispania! 
Domino Gloria! 
Don John of Austria 
Has set his people free! 

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath 
{Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) 
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in 

Spain, 
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain, 
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back 

the blade. . . . 
{^But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.) 



A PRAYER IN DARKNESS 

This much, O heaven — if I should brood or rave, 
Pity me not; but let the world be fed, 
Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead, 

Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave. 

If I dare snarl between this sun and sod, 

Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own, 
In sun and rain and fruit in season shown, 

The shining silence of the scorn of God. 

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power, 
If I must travail in a night of wrath, 
Thank God my tears will never vex a moth, 

Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower. 

ii8 



G. K. Chesterton 

Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had 
Thought it beat brightly, even on — Calvary: 
And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree 

Heard all the crickets singing, and v^^as glad. 



THE DONKEY 

" The tattered outlaw of the earth, 
Of ancient crooked will; 
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, 
I keep my secret still. 

" Fools! For I also had my hour; 
One far fierce hour and sweet: 
There was a shout about my ears, 
And palms before my feet." 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Born at Hexam in 1878, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson has published 
almost a dozen books of verse— the first four or five (see 
Preface) being imitative in manner and sentimentally romantic 
in tone. With The Stonefolds (1907) and Daily Bread (1910), 
Gibson executed a complete right-about-face and, with dra- 
matic brevity, wrote a series of poems mirroring the dreams, 
pursuits and fears of common humanity. Fires (1912) marks 
an advance in technique and power. And though in Liveli- 
hood (1917) Gibson seems to be theatricalizing and merely 
exploiting his working-people, his later lyrics recapture the 
veracity of such memorable poems as "The Old Man, ine 

119 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Blind Rower," and "The Machine." Hill-Tracks (1918) at- 
tempts to capture the beauty of village-naraes and the glamour 
of the English countryside. 



PRELUDE 

As one, at midnight, wakened by the call 
Of golden-plovers in their seaward flight, 
Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fall 
Through tingling silence of the frosty night — 
Who lies and listens, till the last note fails, 
And then, in fancy, faring with the flock 
Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales, 
Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock; 
And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned 
Within the mightier music of the deep, 
No more remembers the sweet piping sound 
That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep; 
So I, first waking from oblivion, heard, 
With heart that kindled to the call of song, 
The voice of young life, fluting like a bird, 
And echoed that light lilting ; till, ere long, 
Lured onward by that happy, singing-flight, 
I caught the stormy summons of the sea, 
And dared the restless deeps that, day and night, 
Surge with the life-song of humanity. 



120 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

THE STONE ^ 

" And will you cut a stone for him, 
To set above his head? 
And will you cut a stone for him — 
A stone for him?" she said. 

Three days before, a splintered rock 

Had struck her lover dead — 

Had struck him in the quarry dead, 

Where, careless of the warning call, 

He loitered, while the shot was fired — 

A lively stripling, brave and tall, 

And sure of all his heart desired . . . 

A flash, a shock, 

A rumbling fall . . . 

And, broken 'neath the broken rock, 

A lifeless heap, with face of clay; 

And still as any stone he lay. 

With eyes that saw the end of all. 

I went to break the news to her; 
And I could hear my own heart beat 
With dread of what my lips might say 
But, some poor fool had sped before; 
And flinging wide her father's door, 
Had blurted out the news to her, 

iFrom Fires by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright i^^^^^^^^ 
The Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. 

121 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Had struck her lover dead for her, 
Had struck the girl's heart dead in her, 
Had struck life, lifeless, at a word, 
And dropped it at her feet: 
Then hurried on his witless way, 
Scarce knowing she had heard. 

And when I came, she stood, alone 
A woman, turned to stone: 
And, though no word at all she said, 
I knew that all was known. 

Because her heart was dead, 
She did not sigh nor moan, 
His mother wept: 
She could not weep. 
Her lover slept: 
She could not sleep. 
Three days, three nights, 
She did not stir: 
Three days, three nights, 
Were one to her, 
Who never closed her eyes 
From sunset to sunrise, 
From dawn to evenfall: 
Her tearless, staring eyes, 
That seeing naught, saw all. 

The fourth night when I came from work, 
I found her at my door. 
" And will you cut a stone for him ? '* 
She said: and spoke no more: 

122 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

But followed me, as I went in, 

And sank upon a chair; 

And fixed her grey eyes on my face, 

With still, unseeing stare. 

And, as she waited patiently, 

I could not bear to feel 

Those still, grey eyes that followed me, 

Those eyes that plucked the heart from me. 

Those eyes that sucked the breath from me 

And curdled the warm blood in me, 

Those eyes that cut me to the bone, 

And pierced my marrow like cold steel. 

And so I rose, and sought a stone; 

And cut it, smooth and square: 

And, as I worked, she sat and watched, 

Beside me, in her chair. 

Night after night, by candlelight, 

I cut her lover's name : 

Night after night, so still and white, 

And like a ghost she came; 

And sat beside me in her chair ; 

And watched with eyes aflame. 

She eyed each stroke; 
And hardly stirred: 
She never spoke 
A single word: 

And not a sound or murmur broke 
The quiet, save the mallet-stroke. 
123 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

With still eyes ever on my hands, 
With eyes that seemed to burn my hands, 
My wincing, overwearied hands, 
She watched, with bloodless lips apart. 
And silent, indrawn breath: 
And every stroke my chisel cut, 
Death cut still deeper in her heart: 
The two of us were chiselling, 
Together, I and death. 

And when at length the job was done, 
And I had laid the mallet by, 
As if, at last, her peace were won. 
She breathed his name ; and, with a sigh. 
Passed slowly hrough the open door: 
And never crossed my threshold more. 

Next night I laboured late, alone. 
To cut her name upon the stone. 



SIGHT ^ 

By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes 
On colours ripe and rich for the heart's desire — 
Tomatoes, redder than Krakatoa's fire, 

1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson 
Gibson. Copyright, 191 5, by The Macmillan Company. Re- 
printed by permission of the publishers. 

124 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre, 

And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise. 

And as I lingered, lost in divine delight, 

My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight 

And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . . . 

When suddenly, behind me in the night, 

I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick. 



John M as e field 

John Masefield was born June i, 1878, in Ledbury, Hertford- 
shire. He was the son of a lawyer but, being of a restless dis- 
position, he look to the sea at an early age and became a 
wanderer for several years. At one time, in 1895, to be exact, 
he worked for a few months as a sort of third assistant bar- 
keeper and dish-washer in Luke O'Connor's saloon, the Colum- 
bia Hotel, in New York City. The place is still there on the 
corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues. 

The results of his wanderings showed in his early works, 
Salt- Water Ballads (1902), Ballads (1903), frank and often 
crude poems of sailors written in their own dialect, and A 
Mainsail Haul (1905), a collection of short nautical stories. In 
these books Masefield possibly overemphasized passion and 
brutality but, underneath the violence, he captured that highly- 
colored realism which is the poetry of life. 

It was not until he published The Everlasting Mercy (191 1) 
that he became famous. Followed quickly by those remarkable 
long narrative poems, The fVidoiv in the Bye Street (1912), 
Dauber (1912), and The Daffodil Fields (1913)1 there is in all 
of these that peculiar blend of physical exulting and spiritual 
exaltation that is so striking, and so typical of Masefield. 
Their very rudeness is lifted to a plane of religious intensity. 
(See Preface.) Pictorially, Masefield is even more forceful. 
The finest moment in The Widow in the Bye Street is the por- 

125 



John M as e field 

trayal of the mother alone in her cottage; the public-house 
scene and the passage describing the birds following the plough 
are the most intense touches in The Everlasting Mercy. Noth- 
ing more vigorous and thrilling than the description of the 
storm at sea in Dauber has appeared in current literature. 

The war, in which Masefield served with the Red Cross in 
France and on the Gallipoli peninsula (of which campaign he 
wrote a study for the government), softened his style; Good 
Friday and Other Poems (1916) is as restrained and dignified 
a collection as that of any of his contemporaries. Reynard the 
Fox (1919) is the best of his new manner with a return of the 
old vivacity. 

Masefield has also written several novels of which Multitude 
and Solitude (1909) is the most outstanding; half a dozen 
plays, ranging from the classical solemnity of Pompey the 
Great to the hot and racy Tragedy of Nan; and one of the 
freshest, most creative critiques of Shakespeare (1911) in the 
last generation. 



A CONSECRATION 

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged 

charioteers 
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the 

years, — 
Rather the scorned — the rejected — the men hemmed in 

with the spears; 

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, 
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. 
The men with the broken heads and the blood running 
into their eyes. 

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, 
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, 
But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known. 

126 



John M as e field 

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the 

road, 
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with 

the goad. 
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. 

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, 
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to 

the shout, 
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out. 

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the 

mirth, 
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;— 
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the 

earth ! 

Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold ; 

Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and 

the cold — 
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. 

Amen. 

SEA-FEVER 

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the 

sky. 
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. 
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white 

sail's shaking, 
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn 

breaking. 

127 



John M as e field 

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running 
tide 

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied ; 

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, 

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea- 
gulls crying. 

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life. 

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's 
like a whetted knife; 

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow- 
rover, 

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's 
over. 



ROUNDING THE HORN 

(From "Dauber*') ^ 

Then came the cry of "Call all hands on deck! " 
The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come: 
Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck, 
And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb. 
Down clattered flying kites and staysails; some 
Sang out in quick, high calls: the fair-leads skirled. 
And from the south-west came the end of the 
world . . . 

^From The Story of a Round-House by John Masefield. 
Copyright, 191 3, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by 
permission of the publishers. 

128 



John M as e field 

" Lay out! " the Bosun yelled. The Dauber laid 

Out on the yard, gripping the yard, and feeling 

Sick at the mighty space of air displayed 

Below his feet, where mewing birds were wheeling. 

A giddy fear was on him ; he was reeling. 

He bit his lip half through, clutching the jack. 

A cold sweat glued the shirt upon his back. 

The yard was shaking, for a brace was loose. 

He felt that he would fall; he clutched, he bent, 

Clammy with natural terror to the shoes 

While idiotic promptings came and went. 

Snow fluttered on a wind-flaw and was spent; 

He saw the water darken. Someone yelled, 

" Frap it; don't stay to furl! Hold on!" He held. 

Darkness came down — half darkness — in a whirl; 

The sky went out, the waters disappeared. 

He felt a shocking pressure of blowing hurl 

The ship upon her side. The darkness speared 

At her with wind ; she staggered, she careered ; 

Then down she lay. The Dauber felt her go, 

He saw her yard tilt downwards. Then the snow 

Whirled all about — dense, multitudinous, cold — 
Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek, 
Which whiffled out men*s tears, defeated, took hold, 
Flattening the flying drift against the cheek. 
The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak. 
The ship lay on her broadside; the wind's sound 
Had devilish malice at having got her downed. 



129 



John M as e field 

How long the gale had blown he could not tell, 
Only the world had changed, his life had died. 
A moment now was everlasting hell. 
Nature an onslaught from the weather side, 
A withering rush of death, a frost that cried, 
Shrieked, till he withered at the heart; a hail 
Plastered his oilskins with an icy mail. , . . 

" Up ! " yelled the Bosun ; " up and clear the wreck! " 
The Dauber followed where he led; below 
He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck 
Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow. 
He saw the streamers of the rigging blow 
Straight out like pennons from the splintered mast, 
Then, all sense dimmed, all was an icy blast. 

Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice. 
Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage. 
An utter bridle given to utter vice. 
Limitless power mad with endless rage 
Withering the soul; a minute seemed an age. 
He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail. 
Thinking that comfort was a fairy tale. 

Told long ago — long, long ago — long since 
Heard of in other lives — imagined, dreamed — 
There where the basest beggar was a prince. 
To him in torment where the tempest screamed, 
Comfort and warmth and ease no longer seemed 
Things that a man could know; soul, body, brain. 
Knew nothing but the wind, the cold, the pain. 

130 



John M as e field 

THE CHOICE 

The Kings go by with jewelled crowns; 
Their horses gleam, their banners shake, 

their spears are many. 
The sack of many-peopled towns 
Is all their dream: 
The way they take 
Leaves bu^a ruin in the brake, 
And, in the furrow that the ploughmen make, 
A stampless penny; a tale, a dream. 

The Merchants reckon up their gold. 
Their letters come, their ships arrive, their 

freights are glories: 
The profits of their treasures sold 
They tell and sum; 
Their foremen drive 
Their servants, starved to half-alive. 
Whose labours do but make the earth a hive 
Of stinking glories; a tale, a dream. 

The Priests are singing in their stalls. 
Their singing lifts, their incense burns, 

their praying clamours; 
Yet God is as the sparrow falls, 
The ivy drifts; 
The votive urns 

Are all left void when Fortune turns, 
The god is but a marble for the kerns 
To break with hammers; a tale, a dream. 
131 



John M as e field 

O Beauty, let me know again 

The green earth cold, the April rain, the 

quiet waters figuring sky, 
The one star risen. 
So shall I pass into the feast 
Not touched by King, Merchant, or Priest; 
Know the red spirit of the beast, 
Be the green grain; 
Escape from prison. 



SONNET ^ 

Is there a great green commonwealth of Thought 

Which ranks the yearly pageant, and decides 

How Summer's royal progress shall be wrought, 

By secret stir which in each plant abides? 

Does rocking daffodil consent that she. 

The snowdrop of wet winters, shall be first? 

Does spotted cowslip with the grass agree 

To hold her pride before the rattle burst? 

And in the hedge what quick agreement goes, 

When hawthorn blossoms redden to decay, 

That Sumrner's pride shall come, the Summer's rose. 

Before the flower be on the bramble spray? 

Or is it, as with us, unresting strife. 

And each consent a lucky gasp for life ? 

1 From Good Friday and Other Poems by John Masefield. 
Copyright, 1916, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by 
permission of the publishers. 

132 



Lord Dunsany 

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, was 
born July 24, 1878, and was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. 
He is best known as an author of fantastic fairy tales and even 
more fantastic plays. The Gods of the Mountain (1911) and 
The Golden Doom (1912) are highly dramatic and intensely 
poetic. A Night at an Inn (1916) is that peculiar novelty, an 
eerie and poetical melodrama. 

Dunsany's prime quality is a romantic and highly colored 
imagination which is rich in symbolism. After the World War, 
in which the playwright served as captain in the Royal Innis- 
killing Fusiliers, Dunsany visited America and revised the re- 
issue of his early tales and prose poems collected in his The 
Book of Wonder. 



SONGS FROM AN EVIL WOOD 



There is no wrath in the stars, 
They do not rage in the sky ; 

I look from the evil wood 

And find myself wondering why. 

Why do they not scream out 
And grapple star against star. 

Seeking for blood in the wood 
As all things round me are? 

They do not glare like the sky 

Or flash like the deeps of the wood; 

But they shine softly on 
In their sacred solitude. 

133 



Lord Dunsany 

To their high, happy haunts 

Silence from us has flown, 
She whom we loved of old 

And know it now she is gone. 

When will she come again, 
Though for one second only? 

She whom we loved is gone 
And the whole world is lonely. 

And the elder giants come 
Sometimes, tramping from far 

Through the weird and flickering light 
Made by an earthly star. 

And the giant with his club. 

And the dwarf with rage in his breath, 
And the elder giants from far, 

They are all the children of Death. 

They are all abroad to-night 

And are breaking the hills with their 
brood, — 

And the birds are all asleep 
Even in Plug Street Wood! 

n 

Somewhere lost in the haze 
The sun goes down in the cold, 

And birds in this evil wood 
Chirrup home as of old; 

134 



Lord Dunsany 

Chirrup, stir and are still, 

On the high twigs frozen and thin. 
There is no more noise of them now, 

And the long night sets in. 

Of all the wonderful things 
That I have seen in the wood 

I marvel most at the birds 
And their wonderful quietude. 

For a giant smites with his club 
All day the tops of the hill, 

Sometimes he rests at night, 
Oftener he beats them still. 

And a dwarf with a grim black mane 

Raps with repeated rage 
All night in the valley below 

On the wooden walls of his cage. 



Ill 

I met with Death in his country. 
With his scythe and his hollow eye. 

Walking the roads of Belgium. 
I looked and he passed me by. 

Since he passed me by in Plug Street, 
In the wood of the evil name, 

I shall not now lie with the heroes, 
I shall not share their fame ; 
135 



Lord Dunsany 

I shall never be as they are, 

A name in the lands of the Free, 

Since I looked on Death in Flanders 
And he did not look at me. 

Edward Thomas 

Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual 
of modern English poets, was born in 1878. For many years 
before he turned to verse, Thomas had a large following as a 
critic and author of travel books, biographies, pot-boilers. 
Hating his hack-work, yet unable to get free of it, he had so 
repressed his creative ability that he had grown doubtful con- 
cerning his own power. It needed something foreign to stir 
and animate what was native in him. So when Robert Frost, 
the New England poet, went abroad in 1912 for two years and 
became an intimate of Thomas's, the English critic began to 
write poetry. Loving, like Frost, the minutice of existence, the 
quaint and casual turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic 
of the English countryside in its unpoeticized quietude. Many 
of his poems are full of a slow, sad contemplation of life and 
a reflection of its brave futility. It is not disillusion exactly; 
it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated to 
Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, things 
as unglorified as the unfreezing of the " rock-like mud," a 
child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests 
uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles — the lines glow 
with a deep and almost abject reverence for the soil. 
, Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on 
Easter Monday, 1917. 

IF I SHOULD EVER BY CHANCE 

If I should ever by chance grow rich 2- 

ril buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, 
And let them all to my elder daughter. 

136 



Edward Thomas 

The rent I shall ask of her will be only 

Each year's first violets, white and lonely, 

The first primroses and orchises — 

She must find them before I do, that is. 

But if she finds a blossom on furze 

Without rent they shall all for ever be hers, 

Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 

Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater, — 

I shall give them all to my elder daughter. 



TALL NETTLES 

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done 
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough 
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone : 
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. 

This corner of the farmyard I like most: 
As well as any bloom upon a flower 
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost 
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower. 



FIFTY FAGGOTS 

There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots 
That once were underwood of hazel and ash 
In Jenny Pinks's Copse. Now, by the hedge 
Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone 

137 



Edward Thomas 

Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next 

Spring 
A blackbird or a robin will nest there, 
Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain 
Whatever is for ever to a bird. 
This Spring it is too late; the swift has come, 
'Twas a hot day for carrying them up: 
Better they will never warm me, though they must 
Light several Winters' fires. Before they are done 
The war will have ended, many other things 
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more 
Foresee or more control than robin and wren. 



COCK-CROW 

Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night 
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, — 
Out of the night, two cocks together crow, 
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow: 
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, 
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand, 
Each facing each as in a coat of arms: — 
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms. 



Seumas O^Sullivan 

James Starkey was born in Dublin in 1879. Writing under 
the psiudonym of Seumas O'Sullivan, he contributed a great 
variety of prose and verse to various Irish papers. His repu- 

138 



Seumas 0*Sullivan 

tation as a poet began with his appearance in Nev) Songs, 
edited by George Russell ("A. E.")- Later, he published The 
Tiviliffkt People (1905), The Earth Lover (1909), and Poems 
(1912). 

PRAISE 



Dear, they are praising your beauty, 
The grass and the sky: 
The sky in a silence of wonder, 
The grass in a sigh. 

I too would sing for your praising, 
Dearest, had I 

Speech as the whispering grass, 
Or the silent sky. 

These have an art for the praising 
Beauty so high. 

Sweet, you are praised in a silence. 
Sung in a sigh. 



Ralph Hodgson 

This exquisite poet was born in Northumberland about 1879. 
One of the most graceful of the younger word-magicians, Ralph 
Hodgson will retain his freshness as long as there are lovers 
of such rare and timeless songs as his. It is difficult to think 
of any anthology of English poetry compiled after 1917 that 
could omit " Eve," " The Song of Honor," and that memorable 
snatch of music, " Time, You Old Gypsy Man." One succumbs 
to the charm of "Eve" at the first reading; for here is the 

139 



Ralph Hodgson 



oldest of all legends told with a surprising simplicity and 
still more surprising freshness. This Eve is neither the con- 
scious sinner nor the Mother of men; she is, in Hodgson's 
candid lines, any young, English country girl — filling her 
basket, regarding the world and the serpent itself with a mild 
and childlike wonder. 

Hodgson's verses, full of the love of all natural things, a 
love that goes out to 

" an idle rainbow 
No less than laboring seas," 
were originally brought out in small pamphlets, and distributed 
by Flying Fame. 



EVE 



Eve, with her basket, was 
Deep In the bells and grass, 
Wading in bells and grass 
Up to her knees. 
Picking a dish of sweet 
Berries and plums to eat, 
Down in the bells and grass 
Under the trees. 

Mute as a mouse in a 
Corner the cobra lay, 
Curled round a bough of the 
Cinnamon tall. . . . 
Now to get even and 
Humble proud heaven and 
Now was the moment or 
Never at all. 

140 



Ralph Hodgson 

*'Eva!" Each syllable 
Light as a flower fell, 
"Eva!" he whispered the 
Wondering maid, 
Soft as a bubble sung 
Out of a linnet's lung, 
Soft and most silverly 
"Eva!" he said. 

Picture that orchard sprite ; 
Eve, with her body white, 
Supple and smooth to her 
Slim finger tips; 
Wondering, listening. 
Listening, wondering. 
Eve with a berry 
Half-way to her lips. 

Oh, had our simple Eve 
Seen through the make-believe! 
Had she but known the 
Pretender he was! 
Out of the boughs he came. 
Whispering still her name, 
Tumbling in twenty rings 
Into the grass. 

Here was the strangest pair 
In the world anywhere. 
Eve in the bells and grass 
Kneeling, and he 
141 



Ralph Hodgson 

Telling his story low. . . , 
Singing birds saw them go 
Down the dark path to 
The Blasphemous Tree. 

Oh, what a clatter when 
Titmouse and Jenny Wren 
Saw him successful and 
Taking his leave! 
How the birds rated him, 
How they all hated him ! 
How they all pitied 
Poor motherless Eve! 

Picture her crying 
Outside in the lane, 
Eve, with no dish of sweet 
Berries and plums to eat. 
Haunting the gate of the 
Orchard in vain. . . . 
Picture the lewd delight 
Under the hill to-night — 
" Eva ! " the toast goes round, 
" Eva! " again. 

TIME, YOU OLD GIPSY MAN 

Time, you old gipsy man, 

Will you not stay, 
Put up your caravan 

Just for one day? 
142 



Ralph Hodgson 

All things I'll give you 
Will you be my guest, 
Bells for your jennet 
Of silver the best, 
Goldsmiths shall beat you 
A great golden ring, 
Peacocks shall bow to you, 
Little boys sing, 
Oh, and sweet girls will 
Festoon you with may. 
Time, you old gipsy, 
Why hasten away? 

Last week in Babylon, 

Last night in Rome, 

Morning, and in the crush 

Under Paul's dome; 

Under Paul's dial 

You tighten your rein — 

Only a moment, 

And off once again; 

Off to some city 

Now blind in the womb, 

Off to another 

Ere that's in the tomb. 

Time, you old gipsy man, 
Will you not stay, 

Put up your caravan 
Just for one day? 
143 



Ralph Hodgson 

THE BIRDCATCHER 

When flighting time is on, I go 
With clap-net and decoj^ 
A-fowling after goldfinches 
And other birds of joy; 

I lurk among the thickets of 
The Heart where they are bred, 
And catch the twittering beauties as 
They fly into my Head. 



THE MYSTERY 

He came and took me by the hand 

Up to a red rose tree, 
He kept His meaning to Himself 

But gave a rose to me. 

I did not pray Him to lay bare 

The mystery to me, 
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, 

And His own face to see. 



Harold Monro 

The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, 
Harold Monro, was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes 
himself as " author, publisher, editor and book-seller." Monro 



Harold Monro 

founded The Poetry Bookshop in London In 1912, a unique 
establishment having as its object a practical relation between 
poetry and the public, and keeping in stock nothing but poetry, 
the drama, and books connected with these subjects. His quar- 
terly Poetry and Drama (discontinued during the war and re- 
vived in 1919 as The Monthly Chapbook)^ was in a sense the 
organ of the younger men; and his shop, in which he has lived 
for the last seven years except while he was in the array, 
became a genuine literary center. 

Of Monro's books, the two most important are Strange Meet- 
ings (1917) and Children of Love (1919). "The Nightingale 
Near the House," one of the loveliest of his poems, is also one 
of his latest and has not yet appeared in any of his volumes. 

THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE 

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: 
It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond 
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond 
Stares. And you sing, you sing. 

That star-enchanted song falls through the air 
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, 
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ; 
And all the night you sing. 

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee 
As all night long I listen, and my brain 
Receives your song; then loses it again 
In moonlight on the lawn. 

Now is your voice a marble high and white, 
Then like a mist on fields of paradise. 
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, 
Then breaks, and it is dawn. 
145 



Harold Monro 



EVERY THING 

Since man has been articulate, 

Mechanical, improvidently wise, 

(Servant of Fate), 

He has not understood the little cries 

And foreign conversations of the small 

Delightful creatures that have followed him 

Not far behind; 

Has failed to hear the sympathetic call 

Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind 

Reposeful Teraphim 

Of his domestic happiness; the Stool 

He sat on, or the Door he entered through: 

He has not thanked them, overbearing fool! 

What is he coming to? 

But you should listen to the talk of these. 
Honest they are, and patient they have kept; 
Served him without his Thank you or his 

Please . . . 
I often heard 

The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word, 
Murmuring, before I slept. 
The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud, 
Then bowed, 
And in a smoky argument 
Into the darkness went. 

146 



Harold Monro 

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath: — 
" Pooh ! I have boiled his water, I don't know 
Why; and he always says I boll too slow. 
He never calls me " Sukie, dear," and oh, 
I wonder why I squander my desire 
Sitting submissive on his kitchen fire." 

Now the old Copper Basin suddenly 

Rattled and tumbled from the shelf. 

Bumping and crying: "I can fall by myself; 

Without a woman's hand 

To patronize and coax and flatter me, 

I understand 

The lean and poise of gravltable land." 

It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout, 

Twisted itself convulsively about. 

Rested upon the floor, and, while I stare, 

It stares and grins at me. 

The old impetuous Gas above my head 
Begins irascibly to flare and fret, 
Wheezing into its epileptic jet, 
Reminding me I ought to go to bed. 

The Rafters creak ; an Empty-Cupboard door 
Swings open ; now a wild Plank of the floor 
Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot. 
Down from the chimney, half a pound of Soot 
Tumbles and lies, and shakes Itself again. 
The Putty cracks against the window-pane. 

147 



Harold Monro 

A piece of Paper in the basket shoves 
Another piece, and toward the bottom moves. 
My independent Pencil, while I write, 
Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock 
Stirs all its body and begins to rock, 
Warning the waiting presence of the Night, 
Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain 
Ticking of ordinary work again. 

You do well to remind me, and I praise 

Your strangely Individual foreign ways. 

You call me from myself to recognize 

Companionship in your unselfish eyes. 

I want your dear acquaintances, although 

I pass you arrogantly over, throw 

Your lovely sounds, and squander them along 

My busy days. I'll do you no more wrong. 

Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat. 

You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat, 

Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak. 

Your touch grow kindlier from week to week. 

It well becomes our mutual happiness 

To go toward the same end more or less. 

There Is not much dissimilarity. 

Not much to choose, I know it well. In fine. 

Between the purposes of you and me, 

And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine. 



148 



Harold Monro 

STRANGE MEETINGS 

If suddenly a clod of earth should rise, 
And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, 
How one would tremble, and in what surprise 
Gasp: " Can you move? " 

I see men walking, and I always feel : 

" Earth ! How have you done this ? What can 

you be?" 
I can't learn how to know men, or conceal 
How strange they are to me. 



r. M. Kettle 

Thomas M. Kettle was born at Artane County, Dublin, in 
1880 and was educated at University College, where he won 
the Gold Medal for Oratory. His extraordinary faculty for 
grasping an intricate problem and crystallizing it in an epi- 
gram, or scoring his adversaries with one bright flash, was 
apparent even then. He was admitted to the bar in 1905 but 
soon abandoned the law to devote himself to journalism, which, 
because of his remarkable style, never remained journalism 
in his hands. In 1906 he entered politics; in 1910 he was 
re-elected for East Tyrone. Even his bitterest opponents con- 
ceded that Tom Kettle (as he was called by friend and enemy) 
was the most honorable of fighters; they acknowledged his 
honesty, courage and devotion to the cause of a United Ireland 
— and respected his penetrating wit. He once spoke of a Mr. 
Healy as "a brilliant calamity" and satirized a long-winded 
speaker by saying, " Mr. Long knows a sentence should have a 
beginning, but he quite forgets it should also have an end." 

149 



T. M. Kettle 

"An Irish torch-bearer" (so E. B. Osborn calls him), Kettle 
fell in action at Ginchy, leading his Fusiliers in September, 
1916. The uplifted poem to his daughter was written shortly 
before his death. 



TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT 
OF GOD 

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown 
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, 
In that desired, delayed, incredible time. 
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, 
And the dear heart that was your baby throne, 
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you 

rhyme 
And reason: some will call the thing sublime, 
And some decry it in a knowing tone. 
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, 
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, 
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead. 
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, — 
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed. 
And for the secret Scripture of the poor. 



Alfred Noyes 



Alfred Noyes was born at Staffordshire, September i6, 1880. 
He is one of the few contemporary poets who have been for- 
tunate enough to write a kind of poetry that is not only saleable 
but popular with many classes of people. 

His first book, The Loom of Years (1902), was published 
when he was only 22 years old, and Poems (1904) intensified 
the promise of his first publication. Swinburne^ grown old and 

150 



Alfred Noyes 

living in retirement, was so struck with Noyes's talent that he 
had the young poet out to read to him. Unfortunately, Noyes 
has not developed his gifts as deeply as his admirers have 
hoped. His poetry, extremely straightforward and rhythmical, 
has often degenerated into cheap sentimentalities and cheaper 
tirades; it has frequently attempted to express programs and 
profundities far beyond Noyes's power. 

What is most appealing about his best verse is its ease and 
heartiness; this singer's gift lies in the almost personal bond 
established between the poet and his public. People have such 
a good time reading his vivacious lines because Noyes had such 
a good time writing them. Rhyme in a thumping rhythm seems 
to be not merely his trade but his morning exercise. Noyes's 
own relish filled and quickened glees and catches like Forty 
Singvig Seamen (1907), the lusty choruses in Tales of the 
Mermaid Tavern (1913), and the genuinely inspired nonsense 
of the earlier Forest of Wild Thyme (1905). 

The least popular work of Noyes is, as a unified product, 
his most remarkable performance. It is an epic in twelve 
books of blank verse, Drake (1908), a glowing pageant of the 
sea and England's drama upon it. It is a spirited echo of the 
maritime Elizabethans; a vivid and orchestral work inter- 
spersed with splendid lyric passages and brisk songs. The 
companion volume, an attempted reconstruction of the literary 
phase of the same period, is less successful ; but these Tales 
of the Mermaid Tavern (which introduce Shakespeare, Mar- 
lowe, Drayton, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and other immortals) are 
alive and colorful, if somewhat too insistently rollicking and 
smoothly lilting. 

His eight volumes were assembled in 1913 and published in 
two books of Collected Poems (Frederick A. Stokes Company). 

SHERWOOD 

Sherwood in the twilight, Is Robin Hood awake? 
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake; 
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn, 
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn. 

151 



Alfred Noyes 

Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves 
Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves, 
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away, 
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day. 

Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June: 
All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon; 
Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist 
Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst. 

Merry, merry England is waking as of old, 
With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold: 
For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting spray 
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day. 

Love is in the greenwood building him a house 
Of wild rose and hawthorn and honeysuckle boughs; 
Love it in the greenwood : dawn is in the skies ; 
And Marian is waiting with a glory in her eyes. 

Hark! The dazzled laverock climbs the golden steep: 

Marian is waiting: is Robin Hood asleep? 

Round the fairy grass-rings frolic elf and fay. 

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day. 

Oberon, Oberon, rake away the gold, 
Rake away the red leaves, roll away the mould, 
Rake away the gold leaves, roll away the red. 
And wake Will Scarlett from his leafy forest bed. 

152 



Alfred Noyes 

Friar Tuck and Little John are riding down together 

With quarter-staflf and drinking-can and grey goose- 
feather ; 

The dead are coming back again; the years are rolled 
away 

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day. 

Softly over Sherwood the south wind blows; 
All the heart of England hid in every rose 
Hears across the greenwood the sunny whisper leap, 
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep? 

Hark, the voice of England wakes him as of old 
And, shattering the silence with a cry of brighter gold, 
Bun:les in the greenwood echo from the steep, 
Sherwood in the red dawn, is Robin Hood asleep? 

Where the deer are gliding down the shadowy glen 
All across the glades of fern he calls his merry men ; 
Doublets of the Lincoln green glancing through the May, 
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day; 

Calls them and they answer: from aisles of oak and ash 
Rings the Follow! Follow! and the boughs begin to 

crash ; 
The ferns begin to flutter and the flowers begin to fly ; 
And through the crimson dawning the robber band 

goes by. 

153 



Alfred Noyes 

Robin! Robin! Robin! All his merry thieves 
Answer as the bugle-note shivers through the leaves: 
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away, 
In Sherwood, In Sherwood, about the break of day. 



THE BARREL-ORGAN 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 

In the City as the sun sinks low; 
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 
it sweet 
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; 
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
pain 
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
light; 
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 

And now it's marching onward through the realms of 
old romance, 
And trolling out a fond familiar tune, 
And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of 
France, 
And now it's prattling softly to the moon. 
And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore 

Of human joys and wonders and regrets; 
To remember and to recompense the music evermore 
For what the cold machinery forgets . . . 

154 



Alfred Noyes 

Yes; as the music changes, 

Like a prismatic glass, 
It takes the light and ranges 

Through all the moods that pass ; 
Dissects the common carnival 

Of passions and regrets. 
And gives the world a glimpse of all 

The colours it forgets. 

And there La Traviata sighs 

Another sadder song; 
And there // Trovatore cries 

A tale of deeper wrong; 
And bolder knights to battle go 

With sword and shield and lance, 
Than ever here on earth below 

Have whirled into — a dance! — 

Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time ; 
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
London!) 
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in sum- 
mer's wonderland ; 
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
London!) 

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and 
sweet perfume. 
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near 
to London!) 

155 



Alfred Noyes 

And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world's 
a blaze of sky 
The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song 
for London. 

The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you'll 
hear him there 
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
London!) 
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long 
halloo 
And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo of owls that ogle 
London. 

For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard 
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
London!) 
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut 
spires are out 
You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing 
for London; — 

Come down to Kew iw lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac- 
time; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isn't far from 
London/) 
And you shall wander hand im hand with love in sum- 
mer s wonderland; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time {is isnt far from 
London!) 

156 



Alfred Noyes 

And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden 

street, 
In the city as the sun sinks low ; 
And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary 

feet 
Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat, 
And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll never 

meet. 
Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies 

and the wheat, 
In the land where the dead dreams go. 

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote // Trovatore did you 

dream 
Of the City when the sun sinks low, 
Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured 

stream 
On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that 

seem 
To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam 
As A che la morte parodies the world's eternal theme 
And pulses with the sunset-glow? 

There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen 
stone 
In the City as the sun sinks low; ' 

There's a portly man of business with a balance of his 

own, 
There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful 
tone, 

157 



Alfred Noyes 

And they're all of them returning to the heavens they 

have knovi^n : 
They are crammed and jammed in busses and — they're 

each of them alone 
In the land where the dead dreams go. 

There's a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead 

In the City as the sun sinks low ; 
And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red 
As he sees a loafer watching him and — there he turns his 

head 
And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, 
For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led 

Through the land where the dead dreams go . . . 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 

In the City as the sun sinks low; 
Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it 

sweet 
Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven 

meet 
Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand 

feet 
Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the 

wheat 
In the land where the dead dreams go. 

So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah, 

What have you to say 
When you meet the garland girls 

Tripping on their way? 
158 



Alfred Noyes 

All around my gala hat 

I wear a wreath of roses 
(A long and lonely year it is 

I've waited for the May!) 
If any one should ask you, 

The reason why I wear it is — 
My own love, my true love is coming 
home to-day. 

And it's buy a bunch of violets for the lady 

(It^s lilac-time in London; ifs lilac-time in London!) 

Buy a bunch of violets for the lady; 
While the sky burns blue above : 

On the other side the street you'll find it shady 

{It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!) 

But buy a bunch of violets for the lady, 
And tell her she's your own true love. 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden 
street 
In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow; 
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 

it sweet 
And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song 

complete 
In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morn- 
ing meet. 
As it dies into the sunset glow; 

159 



Alfred Noyes 

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
pain 
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
light, 
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 

And there, as the music changes, 

The song runs round again ; 
Once more it turns and ranges 

Through all its joy and pain: 
Dissects the common carnival 

Of passions and regrets; 
And the wheeling world remembers all 

The wheeling song forgets. 

Once more La Traviata sighs 

Another sadder song: 
Once more // Trovatore cries 

A tale of deeper wrong; 
Once more the knights to battle go 

With sword and shield and lance 
Till once, once more, the shattered foe 

Has whirled into — a dance! 

Come down to Keiv in lilac-timej in lilac-timej in lilac- 
time; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isn't far front 
London/) 

i6o 



Alfred Noyes 

And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in sum- 
mer s wonderland. 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isnt far from 
London!) 



EPILOGUE 

{From " The Flower of Old Japan **) 

Carol, every violet has 
Heaven for a looking-glass ! 

Every little valley lies 
Under many-clouded skies; 
Every little cottage stands 
Girt about with boundless lands. 
Every little glimmering pond 
Claims the mighty shores beyond — 
Shores no seamen ever hailed, 
Seas no ship has ever sailed. 

All the shores when day is done 
Fade into the setting sun, 
So the story tries to teach 
More than can be told in speech. 

Beauty is a fading flower, 
Truth is but a wizard's tower. 
Where a solemn death-bell tolls, 
And a forest round it rolls. 
i6i 



Alfred Noyes 

We have come by curious ways 
To the light that holds the days; 
We have sought in haunts of fear 
For that all-enfolding sphere: 
And lo ! it was not far, but near. 
We have found, O foolish-fond. 
The shore that has no shore beyond. 

Deep in every heart it lies 
With its untranscended skies; 
For what heaven should bend above 
Hearts that own the heaven of love? 

Carol, Carol, we have come 
Back to heaven, back to home. 

Padraic Colum 

Padraic Colum was born at Longford, Ireland (In the same 
county as Oliver Goldsmith), December 8, 1881, and was edu- 
cated at the local schools. At 20 he was a member of a group 
that created the Irish National Theatre, afterwards called The 
Abbey Theatre. 

Colum began as a dramatist with Broken Soil (1904), The 
Land (1905), Thomas Muskerry (1910), and this early dramatic 
influence has colored much of his work, his best poetry being 
in the form of dramatic lyrics. Pf^ild Earth, his most notable 
collection of verse, first appeared in 1909, and an amplified edi- 
tion of it was published in America in 1916. 

THE PLOUGHER 

Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, 

earth broken ; 
Beside him two horses — a plough! 

162 



Padraic Colum 

Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn man 

there in the sunset, 
And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder 

of cities! 

"Brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker! Can'st 
hear? 
There are ages between us. 
" Is it praying you are as you stand there alone in the 
sunset ? 

" Surely our sky-born gods can be naught to you, earth 

child and earth master? 
" Surely your thoughts are of Pan, or of Wotan, or 

Dana? 

"Yet, why give thought to the gods? Has Pan led your 

brutes where they stumble? 
" Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put 

hands to your plough ? 

"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing 

lone and bowed earthward, 
" Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the 

night-giving God." 

Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with 

the savage; 
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth 

only above them. 

163 



Padraic Colum 

A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and 

the height up to heaven, 
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, 

purples, and splendors. 



AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS 

O, to have a little house ! 
To own the hearth and stool and all! 
The heaped up sods upon the fire, 
The pile of turf against the w^all! 

To have a clock w^ith vv^eights and chains 
And pendulum swinging up and down ! 
A dresser filled with shining delph. 
Speckled and white and blue and brown! 

I could be busy all the day 

Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor. 

And fixing on their shelf again 

My white and blue and speckled store! 

I could be quiet there at night 

Beside the fire and by myself. 

Sure of a bed and loth to leave 

The ticking clock and the shining delph! 

Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark, 
And roads where there's never a house nor bush, 
And tired I am of bog and road. 
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush! 
164 



Padraic Coliim 

And I am praying to God on high, 
And I am praying Him night and day, 
For a little house — a house of my own — 
Out of the wind's and the rain's way. 



Joseph Campbell 

{Seosamh MacCathmhaoil) 

Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in i88i, and is not 
only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for The 
Rushlight (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under 
the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen 
books of verse, the most striking of which is The Mountainy 
Singer, first published in Dublin in 1909. 

I AM THE MOUNTAINY SINGER 

I am the mountainy singer — 
The voice of the peasant's dream, 
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill, 
The leap of the fish in the stream. 

Quiet and love I sing — 
The earn on the mountain crest, 
The cailin in her lover's arms, 
The child at its mother's breast. 

Beauty and peace I sing — 
The fire on the open hearth, 
The cailleach spinning at her wheel, 
The plough in the broken earth. 

165 



Joseph Campbell 

Travail and pain .1 sing — 
The bride on the childing bed, 
The dark man laboring at his rhymes, 
The eye in the lambing shed. 

Sorrow and death I sing — 
The canker come on the corn, 
The fisher lost in the mountain loch, 
The cry at the mouth of morn. 

No other life I sing, 

For I am sprung of the stock 

That broke the hilly land for bread. 

And built the nest in the rock! 



THE OLD WOMAN 

As a white candle 

In a holy place, 
So is the beauty 

Of an aged face. 

As the spent radiance 
Of the winter sun. 

So is a woman 

With her travail done, 

Her brood gone from her. 
And her thoughts as still 

As the waters 

Under a ruined mill. 
i66 



James Stephens 

This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 
1882. Stephens was discovered in an office and saved from 
clerical slavery by George Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, 
Stephens's most poetic moments are in his highly-colored prose. 
And yet, although the finest of his novels. The Crock of Gold 
(1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than 
all his volumes of verse, his Insurrections (1909) and The Hill 
of Vision (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once hotly 
ironic and coolly whimsical. 

Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend of 
incongruities — he combines in his verse the grotesque, the 
buoyant and the profound. No fresher or more brightly vigor- 
ous imagination has come out of Ireland since J. M. Synge. 



THE SHELL 

And then I pressed the shell 
Close to my ear 
And listened well, 
And straightway like a bell 
Came low and clear 

The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, 
Whipped by an icy breeze 
Upon a shore 
Wind-swept and desolate. 
It was a sunless strand that never bore 
The footprint of a man, 
Nor felt the weight 
Since time began 
Of any human quality or stir 
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. 
And in the hush of waters was the sound 
Of pebbles rolling round, 
For ever rolling with a hollow sound. 

167 



y 



James Stephens 

And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go 

Swish to and fro 

Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. 

There was no day, 

Nor ever came a night 

Setting the stars alight 

To wonder at the moon: 

Was twilight only and the frightened croon, 

Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind 

And waves that journeyed blind — 

And then I loosed my ear . . . O, It was sweet 

To hear a cart go jolting down the street. 



WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB 

I saw God. Do you doubt it? 

Do you dare to doubt it? 
I saw the Almighty Man. His hand 
Was resting on a mountain, and 
He looked upon the World and all about it: 
I saw him plainer than you see me now, 

You mustn't doubt It. 

He was not satisfied; 

His look was all dissatisfied. 
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight 
Behind the world's curve, and there was light 
Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, 
" That star went always wrong, and from the start 

I was dissatisfied." 

i68 



James Stephens 

He lifted up His hand — 

I say He heaved a dreadful hand 
Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, " Stay, 
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way; 
And I will never move from where I stand.'* 
He said, " Dear child, I feared that you were dead,'* 

And stayed His hand. 



TO THE FOUR COURTS, PLEASE 

The driver rubbed at his nettly chin 

With a huge, loose forefinger, crooked and black. 

And his wobbly, violet lips sucked in. 

And puffed out again and hung down slack: 

One fang shone through his lop-sided smile. 

In his little pouched eye flickered years of guile. 

And the horse, poor beast, it was ribbed and forked, 
And its ears hung down, and its eyes were old, 
And its knees were knuckly, and as we talked 
It swung the stiff neck that could scarcely hold 
Its big, skinny head up — then I stepped in, 
And the driver climbed to his seat with a grin. 

God help the horse and the driver too. 
And the people and beasts who have never a friend, 
For the driver easily might have been you. 
And the horse be me by a different end. 
And nobody knows how their days will cease, 
And the poor, when they're old, have little of peace. 

169 



John Drinkwater 

Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 1882, 
is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln — A Play 
(1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical 
biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most 
of them meditative and elegiac in mood. 

The best of his verses have been collected in Poems, 1908- 
19, and the two here reprinted are used by permission, and 
by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the 
authorized publishers. 



RECIPROCITY 

I do not think that skies and meadows are 
Moral, or that the fixture of a star 
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees 
Have wisdom in their windless silences. 
Yet these are things invested in my mood 
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude ; 
That in my troubled season I can cry 
Upon the wide composure of the sky, 
And envy fields, and wish that I might be 
As little daunted as a star or tree. 



A TOWN WINDOW 

Beyond my window in the night 
Is but a drab inglorious street, 

Yet there the frost and clean starlight 
As Gwtx Warwick woods are sweet. 
170 



John Drinkwater 

Under the grey drift of the town 
The crocus works among the mould 

As eagerly as those that crown 

The Warwick spring in flame and gold. 

And when the tramway down the hill 
Across the cobbles moans and rings, 

There is about my window-sill 
The tumult of a thousand wings. 



James Joyce 

James Joyce was born at Dublin, February 2, 1882, and edu- 
cated in Ireland. He is best known as a highly sensitive and 
strikingly original writer of prose, his most celebrated works 
being Dubliners (1914) and the novel, A Portrait of the Artist 
as a Young Man (1916). His one volume of verse, Chamber 
Music, was published in this country in 1918. 



I HEAR AN ARMY 

I hear an army charging upon the land, 

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their 
knees: 
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, 

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the 
charioteers. 

They cry unto the night their battle-name : 

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling 
laughter. 
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame. 
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil. 

171 



James Joyce 

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair: 
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. 

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair ? 
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone ? 



J. C. Squire 

Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1884, at Plymouth, of 
Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and Cam- 
bridge University, and became known first as a remarkably 
adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and Tricks 
of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what is more, 
excellent criticism. He edited The New Statesman for a while 
and founded The London Mercury (a monthly of which he is 
editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym ** Solomon 
Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every week for 
six years, many of these papers being collected in his volume. 
Books in General (1919). 

His original poetry is intellectual bu-t simple, sometimes 
metaphysical and always interesting technically in its fluent and 
variable rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 
was published under the title. Poems: First Series. 



A HOUSE 

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, 
In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires. 

And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him 
Keep but in memory their borrowed fires. 

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, 
From that faint exquisite celestial strand, 

And turn and see again the only dwelling-place 
In this wide wilderness of darkening land. 

172 



/. C. Squire 

The house, that house, O now what change has come 
to ft. 

Its crude red-brick fagade, its roof of slate ; 
What imperceptible swift hand has given it 

A new, a wonderful, a queenly state? 

No hand has altered ft, that parallelogram, 

So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; 
That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it 
was; 

No, it is not that any line has changed. 

Only that loneliness is now accentuate 

And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, 

This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, 
And all man's energies seem very brave. 

And this mean edifice, which some dull architect 
Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind. 

Takes on the quality of that magnificent 
Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind. 

Darkness and stars will come, and long the night 
will be. 

Yet imperturbable that house will rest, 
Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, 

Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast. 

Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac 
May howl their menaces, and hail descend : 

Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, 
Not even scornfully, and wait the end. 

173 



7. C. Squire 

And all a universe of nameless messengers 
From unknown distances may whisper fear, 

And it will imitate immortal permanence, 
And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear. 

It stood there yesterday; it will to-morrow, too, 
When there is none to watch, no alien eyes 

To watch its ugliness assume a majesty 
From this great solitude of evening skies. 

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, 
While life remains to it prepared to outface 

Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries 

May hide and wait for it in time and space. 



Lascelles Abercrombie 

Lascelles Abercrombie was born in 1884. Like Masefield, he 
gained his reputation rapidly; totally unknown until 1909, upon 
the publication of Interludes and Poems, he was recognized as 
one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his period. Emblems 
of Love (1912), the ripest collection of his blank verse dia- 
logues, justified the enthusiasm of his admirers. 

Many of Abercrombie's poems, the best of which are too long 
to quote, are founded on scriptural themes, but his blank verse 
is not biblical either in mood or manner. It is the undercur- 
rent rather than the surface of his verse which moves with a 
strong religious conviction. Abercrombie's images are daring 
and brilliant; his lines, sometimes too closely packed, glow 
with a dazzling intensity that is warmly spiritual and fervently 
human. 



174 



Lascelles Abercrombie 



FROM " VASHTI " 

What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty ? 
Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all 
The world, but an awning scaffolded amid 
The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge 
This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty? 
The East and West kneel down to thee, the 

North 
And South ; and all for thee their shoulders bear 
The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn 
Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea. 
Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men 
That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears 
Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, 
Whatever has been passionate in clay. 
Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body 
The yearnings of all men measured and told, 
Insatiate endless agonies of desire 
Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! 
What beauty is there, but thou makest it? 
How is earth good to look on, woods and fields. 
The season's garden, and the courageous hills. 
All this green raft of earth moored in the seas? 
The manner of the sun to ride the air, 
The stars God has imagined for the night? 
What's this behind them, that we cannot near. 
Secret still on the point of being blabbed, 

175 



Lascelles Abercromhie 

The ghost in the world that flies from being named ? 
Where do they get their beauty from, all these? 
They do but glaze a lantern lit for man, 
And woman's beauty is the flame therein. 



SONG 

{From " Judith") 

Balkis was in her marble town, 
And shadow over the world came down. 
Whiteness of walls, towers and piers, 
That all day dazzled eyes to tears, 
Turned from being white-golden flame, 
And like the deep-sea blue became. 
Balkis into her garden went ; 
Her spirit was in discontent 
Like a torch in restless air. 
Joylessly she wandered there, 
And saw her city's azure white 
Lying under the great night, 
Beautiful as the memory 
Of a worshipping world would be 
In the mind of a god, in the hour 
When he must kill his outward power; 
And, coming to a pool where trees 
Grew in double greeneries, 
Saw herself, as she went by 
The water, walking beautifully, 
176 



Lascelles Abercrombie 

And saw the stars shine in the glance 

Of her eyes, and her own fair countenance 

Passing, pale and wonderful, 

Across the night that filled the pool. 

And cruel was the grief that played 

With the queen's spirit ; and she said : 

" What do I here, reigning alone ? 

For to be unloved is to be alone. 

There is no man in all my land 

Dare my longing understand; 

The whole folk like a peasant bows 

Lest its look should meet my brows 

And be harmed by this beauty of mine. 

I burn their brains as I were sign 

Of God's beautiful anger sent 

To master them with punishment 

Of beauty that must pour distress 

On hearts grown dark with ugliness. 

But it is I am the punisht one. 

Is there no man, is there none. 

In whom my beauty will but move 

The lust of a delighted love; 

In whom some spirit of God so thrives 

That we may wed our lonely lives. 

Is there no man, is there none? " — 

She said, " I will go to Solomon.*' 



177 



James Elroy Flecker 

Another remarkable poet whose early death was a blow to 
English literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, 
November 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker 
found little to interest him but a classical reaction against 
realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a pas- 
sion for technical perfection — especially the deliberate technique 
of the French Parnassians whom he worshipped. Flecker was 
opposed to any art that was emotional or that " taught " any- 
thing. " The poet's business," he declared, " is not to save the 
soul of man, but to make it worth saving." 

The advent of the war began to make Flecker's verse more 
personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed 
him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him 
from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and 
death. He passionately denied that he was weary of living 
*' as the pallid poets are," and he was attempting higher flights 
of song when his singing ceased altogether. 

His two colorful volumes are T/ie Golden Journey to 
Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915). 



THE OLD SHIPS 

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep 

Beyond the village v^^hich men still call Tyre, 

With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep 

For Famagusta and the hidden sun 

That rings black Cyprus v^^ith a lake of fire; 

And all those ships were certainly so old — 

Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, 

Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, 

The pirate Genoese 

Hell-raked them till they rolled 

178 



James Elroy Flecker 

Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. 
But now through friendly seas they softly run, 
Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green, 
Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold. 

But I have seen, 

Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn 

And image tumbled on a rose-swept bay, 

A drowsy ship of some yet older day ; 

And, wonder's breath indrawn, 

Thought I — who knows — who knows — but in that 

same 
(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new 
— Stern painted brighter blue — ) 
That talkative, bald-headed seaman came 
(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar) 
From Troy's doom-crimson shore, 
And with great lies about his wooden horse 
Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course. 

It was so old a ship — who knows, who knows? 
— And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain 
To see the mast burst open with a rose, 
And the whole deck put on its leaves again. 



D. H. Lawrence 

David Herbert Lawrence, born in 1885, is one of the most 
psychologically intense of the modern poets. This intensity, 
ranging from a febrile morbidity to an exalted and almost 
frenzied mysticism, is seen even in his prose works — particu- 
larly in his short stories. The Prussian Officer (i9i7)» ^i^ 

179 



D. H. Lawrence 

analytical Sons and Lovers (1913), and the rhapsodic novel, 
The Rainbonv (1915). 

As a poet he is often caught in the net of his own emotions; 
his passion thickens his utterance and distorts his rhythms, 
which sometimes seem purposely harsh and bitter-flavored. But 
within his range he is as powerful as he is poignant. His most 
notable volumes of poetry are Amores (1916), Look! We Have 
Come Through! (1918), and Nevo Poems (1920). 

PEOPLE 

The great gold apples of light 
Hang from the street's long bough 

Dripping their light 
On the faces that drift below, 
On the faces that drift and blow 
Down the night-time, out of sight 

In the wind's sad sough. 

The ripeness of these apples of night 
Distilling over me 

Makes sickening the white 
Ghost-flux of faces that hie 
Them endlessly, endlessly by 
Without meaning or reason why 

They ever should be. 

PIANO 

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me ; 
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see 
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the 

tingling strings 
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who 

smiles as she sings. 

180 



D. H. Lawrence 

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song 
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong 
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter 

outside 
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano 

our guide. 

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour 
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour 
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast 
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child 
for the past. 



John Freeman 

John Freeman, born in 1885, has published several volumes 
of pleasantly descriptive verse. The two most distinctive are 
Stone Trees (191 6) and Memories of Childhood (1919). 



STONE TREES 

Last night a sword-light in the sky 
Flashed a swift terror on the dark. 
In that sharp light the fields did lie 
Naked and stone-like; each tree stood 
Like a tranced woman, bound and stark. 

Far off the wood 
With darkness ridged the riven dark. 
181 



John Freeman 

And cows astonished stared with fear, 
And sheep crept to the knees of cows, 
And conies to their burrows slid. 
And rooks were still in rigid boughs, 
And all things else were still or hid. 

From all the wood 
Came but the owl's hoot, ghostly, clear. 

In that cold trance the earth was held 
It seemed an age, or time was nought. 
Sure never from that stone-like field 
Sprang golden corn, nor from those chill 
Grey granite trees was music wrought. 

In all the wood 
Even the tall poplar hung stone still. 

It seemed an age, or time was none . . . 
Slowly the earth heaved out of sleep 
And shivered, and the trees of stone 
Bent and sighed in the gusty wind, 
And rain swept as birds flocking sweep. 

Far off the wood 
Rolled the slow thunders on the wind. 

From all the wood came no brave bird, 

No song broke through the close-fall'n night, 

Nor any sound from cowering herd: 

Only a dog's long lonely howl 

When from the window poured pale light. 

And from the wood 
The hoot came ghostly of the owl. 
182 



Shane Leslie 

Shane Leslie, the only surviving son of Sir John Leslie, was 
born at Swan Park, Monaghan, Ireland, in 1886 and was edu- 
cated at Eton and the University of Paris. He worked for a 
time among the Irish poor and was deeply interested in the 
Celtic revival. During the greater part of a year he lectured 
in the United States, marrying an American, Marjorie Ide. 

Leslie has been editor of The Dublin Review since 1916. He 
is the author of several volumes on Irish political matters as 
well as The End of a Chapter and Verses in Peace and War. 



FLEET STREET 

I never see the newsboys run 
Amid the whirling street, 
With swift untiring feet, 

To cry the latest venture done, 

But I expect one day to hear 
Them cry the crack of doom 
And risings from the tomb, 

With great Archangel Michael near; 

And see them running from the Fleet 
As messengers of God, 
With Heaven's tidings shod 

About their brave unwearied feet. 

THE PATER OF THE CANNON 

Father of the thunder, 

Flinger of the flame, 
Searing stars asunder, 

Hallowed be Thy Name! 

183 



Shane Leslie 

By the sweet-sung quiring 

Sister bullets hum, 
By our fiercest firing, 

May Thy Kingdom come! 

By Thy strong apostle 

Of the Maxim gun, 
By his Pentecostal 

Flame, Thy Will be done! 

Give us, Lord, good feeding 
To Thy battles sped — 

Flesh, white grained and bleeding, 
Give for daily bread! 



Frances Cornford 

The daughter of Francis Darwin, third son of Charles Dar- 
win, Mrs. Frances Macdonald Cornford, whose husband is a 
Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, was born in 1886. She 
has published three volumes of unaffected lyrical verse, the 
most recent of which, Spring Morning, was brought out by 
The Poetry Bookshop in 191 5. 



PREfxiSTENCE 

I laid me down upon the shore 
And dreamed a little space; 

I heard the great waves break and roar; 
The sun was on my face. 
184 



Frances Cornford 

My idle hands and fingers brown 
Played with the pebbles grey; 

The waves came up, the waves went down, 
Most thundering and gay. 

The pebbles, they were smooth and round 

And warm upon my hands, 
Like little people I had found 

Sitting among the sands. 

The grains of sand so shining-small 

Soft through my fingers ran; 
The sun shone down upon it all. 

And so my dream began: 

How all of this had been before i 

How ages far away 
I lay on some forgotten shore 

As here I lie to-day. 

The waves came shining up the sands, 

As here to-day they shine; 
And in my pre-pelasgian hands 

The sand was warm and fine. 

I have forgotten whence I came, 

Or what my home might be, 
Or by what strange and savage name 

I called that thundering sea. 

185 



Frances Cornford 

I only know the sun shone down 

As still it shines to-day, 
And in my fingers long and brown 

The little pebbles lay. 



Anna Wickham 

Anna Wickham, one of the most individual of the younger 
women-poets, has published two distinctive volumes, The Cott' 
templative Quarry (1915) and The Man luith a Hammer 
(1916). 



THE SINGER 

If I had peace to sit and sing, 
Then I could make a lovely thing ; 
But I am stung with goads and whips, 
So I build songs like iron ships. 

Let it be something for my song, 
If it is sometimes swift and strong. 

REALITY 

Only a starveling singer seeks 

The stuff of songs among the Greeks. 

Juno is old, 

Jove's loves are cold ; 

Tales over-told. 

186 



Anna Wickham 

By a new risen Attic stream 

A mortal singer dreamed a dream. 

Fixed he not Fancy's habitation, 

Nor set in bonds Imagination. 

There are new waters, and a new Humanity. 

For all old myths give us the dream to be. 

We are outwearied with Persephone; 

Rather than her, we'll sing Reality. 



SONG 

I was so chill, and overworn, and sad, 
To be a lady was the only joy I had. 
I walked the street as silent as a mouse, 
Buying fine clothes, and fittings for the house. 

But since I saw my love 
I wear a simple dress, 
And happily I move 
Forgetting weariness. 



Siegfried S as scon 

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, the poet -whom Masefield hailed 
as "one of England's most brilliant rising stars," was born 
September S, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and 
Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal 
Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in 
Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded 
on the battlefield. 

187 



Siegfried Sassoon 

His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods — the lyric 
and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without signifi- 
cance or individuality. But with The Old Huntsman (1917) 
Sassoon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading 
younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. 
The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Mase- 
field, gave little evidence of what was to come. Immediately 
following it, however, came a series of war poems, undis- 
guised in their tragedy and bitterness. Every line of these 
quivering stanzas bore the mark of a sensitive and outraged 
nature; there was scarcely a phrase that did not protest against 
the " glorification " and false glamour of war. 

Counter-Attack appeared in 191 8. In this volume Sassoon 
turned entirely from an ordered loveliness to the gigantic bru- 
tality of war. At heart a lyric idealist, the bloody years intensi- 
fied and twisted his tenderness till what was stubborn and 
satiric in him forced its way to the top. In Counter-Attack 
Sassoon found his angry outlet. Most of these poems are 
choked with passion; many of them are torn out, roots and all, 
from the very core of an intense conviction; they rush on, not 
so much because of the poet's art but almost in spite of it. A 
suave utterance, a neatly-joined structure would be out of 
place and even inexcusable in poems like " The Rear-Guard," 
"To Any Dead Officer," "Does It Matter? "—verses that are 
composed of love, fever and indignation. 

Can Sassoon see nothing glorious or uplifting in war? His 
friend, Robert Nichols, another poet and soldier, speaks for him 
in a preface. " Let no one ever," Nichols quotes Sassoon as 
saying, " from henceforth say one word in any way countenanc- 
ing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there 
the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war 
is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there 
even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its 
spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages. . . ." 
Nichols adds his approval to these sentences, saying, " For 
myself, this is the truth. War does not ennoble, it degrades." 

Early in 1920 Sassoon visited America. At the same time 
he brought out his Picture Shoiv (1920), a vigorous answer to 
those who feared that Sassoon had " written himself out " or 
had begun to burn away in his own fire. Had Rupert Brooke 

188 



Siegfried Sassoon 

lived, he might have written many of these lacerated but some- 
how exalted lines. Sassoon's three volumes are the most vital 
and unsparing records of the war we have had. They syn- 
thesize in poetry what Barbusse's Under Fire spreads out in 
panoramic prose. 

TO VICTORY 



Return to greet me, colours that were my joy, 
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain, 
But shining as a garden ; come with the streaming 
Banners of dawn and sundown after rain. 

I want to fill my gaze with blue and silver, 
Radiance through living roses, spires of green, 
Rising in young-limbed copse and lovely wood, 
Where the hueless wind passes and cries unseen. 

I am not sad; only I long for lustre, — 

Tired of the greys and browns and leafless ash. 

I would have hours that move like a glitter of 

dancers, 
Far from the angry guns that boom and flash. 

Return, musical, gay with blossom and fleetness. 
Days when my sight shall be clear and my heart 

rejoice ; 
Come from the sea with breadth of approaching 

brightness, 
When the blithe wind laughs on the hills with 
uplifted voice. 

189 



Siegfried Sassoon 

DREAMERS 

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land, 

Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. 
In the great hour of destiny they stand, 

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows. 
Soldiers are sworn to action ; they must win 

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. 
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin 

They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives. 

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats. 
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, 

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, 
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain 

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, 
And going to the office in the train. 



THE REAR-GUARD 

Groping along the tunnel, step by step, 

He winked his prying torch with patching glare 

From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. 

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, 
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; 
And he, exploring fifty feet below 
The rosy gloom of battle overhead. 

190 



Siegfried Sassoon 

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie 
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug, 
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. 
" I'm looking for headquarters." No reply. 
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no 

sleep.) 
" Get up and guide me through this stinking place." 
Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, 
And flashed his beam across the livid face 
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore 
Agony dying hard ten days before; 
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. 
Alone he staggered on until he found 
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair 
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground 
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. 
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair. 
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, 
Unloading hell behind him step by step. 



THRUSHES 

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim, 
Whose voices make the emptiness of light 
A windy palace. Quavering from the brim 
Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night. 
They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing 
Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof 

191 



Siegfried S as so on 

Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; 
Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; 
Who hears the cry of God in everything, 
And storms the gate of nothingness for proof. 



AFTERMATH 

Have you forgotten yet? . . . 

For the world's events have rumbled on since those 

gagged days, 
Like trafHc checked a while at the crossing of city 

ways: 
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with 

thoughts that flow 
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man 

reprieved to go, 
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to 

spare. 
But the past is just the same, — and War's a bloody 

game, . . . 
Have you forgotten yet? . . . 
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll 

never forget. 

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at 

Mametz, — 
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled 

sandbags on parapets? 
192 



Siegfried Sassoon 

Do you remember the rats; and the stench 

Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, — 

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless 

rain ? 
Do you ever stop and ask, ** Is it all going to happen 

again ? " 

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, — 
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook 

you then 
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your 

men ? 
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back 
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey 
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? 

Have you forgotten yet? . . . 

Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you II 
never forget. 



Rupert Brooke 

Possibly the most famous of the Georgians, Rupert Brooke, 
was born at Rugby in August, 1887, his father being assistant 
master at the school. As a youth, Brooke was keenly interested 
in all forms of athletics; playing cricket, football, tennis, and 
swimming as well as most professionals. He was six feet tall, 
his finely molded head topped with a crown of loose hair of 
lively brown; "a golden young Apollo," said Edward Thomas. 
Another friend of his wrote, " to look at, he was part of the 
youth of the world. He was one of the handsomest Englishmen 
of his time." His beauty overstressed somewhat his naturally 

193 



Rupert Brooke 



romantic disposition; his early poems are a blend of delight in 
the splendor of actuality and disillusion in a loveliness that 
dies. The shadow of John Donne lies over his pages. 

This occasional cynicism was purged, when after several 
years of travel (he had been to Germany, Italy and Honolulu) 
the war came, turning Brooke away from 

" A world grown old and cold and weary . . . 
And half men, and their dirty songs and dreary, 
And all the little emptiness of love." 

Brooke enlisted with a relief that was like a rebirth; he 
sought a new energy in the struggle " where the worst friend 
and enemy is but Death." After seeing service in Belgium, 
1914, he spent the following winter in a training-camp in 
Dorsetshire and sailed with the British Mediterranean Expedi- 
tionary Force in February, 1915, to take part in the unfortunate 
Dardenelles Campaign. 

Brooke never reached his destination. He died of blood- 
poison at Skyros, April 23, 1915. His early death was one of 
England's great literary losses; Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. 
Gibson (with both of whom he had been associated on the 
quarterly, Neiv Numbers) ^ Walter De la Mare, the Hon. 
Winston Spencer Churchill, and a host of others united to pay 
tribute to the most brilliant and passionate of the younger poets. 

Brooke's sonnet-sequence, IQ14 (from which "The Soldier" 
is taken), which, with prophetic irony, appeared a few weeks 
before his death, contains the accents of immortality. And 
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester " (unfortunately too long 
to reprint in this volume), is fully as characteristic of the lighter 
and more playful side of Brooke's temperament. Both these 
phases are combined in " The Great Lover," of which Aber- 
crombie has written, " It is life he loves, and not in any ab- 
stract sense, but all the infinite little familiar details of life, 
remembered and catalogued with delightful zest." 



194 



Rupert Brooke 

THE GREAT LOVERS 

I have been so great a lover : filled my days 

So proudly w^ith the splendour of Love's praise, 

The paki, the calm, and the astonishment, 

Desire illimitable, and still content. 

And all dear names men use, to cheat despair, 

For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear 

Our hearts at random down the dark of life. 

Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife 

Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far, 

My night shall be remembered for a star 

That outshone all the suns of all men's days. 

Shall I not crown them with immortal praise 

Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me 

High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see 

The inenarrable godhead of delight? 

Love is a flame; — we have beaconed the world's night. 

A city: — and we have built it, these and L 

An emperor: — we have taught the world to die. 

So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence. 

And the high cause of Love's magnificence, 

And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names 

Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames, 

And set them as a banner, that men may know. 

To dare the generations, burn, and blow 

Out on, the wind of Time, shining and streaming. . . . 

iProm The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copy- 
right, 191 5, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 

195 



Rupert Brooke 

These I have loved : 

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; 
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust 
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; 
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; 
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; 
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny 

hours, 
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon ; 
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon 
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss 
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is 
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen 
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; 
The benison of hot water; furs to touch; 
The good smell of old clothes; and other such — 
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers, 
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers 
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . . 

Dear names, 
And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames; 
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring; 
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing: 
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain, 
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; 
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam 
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; 
And washen stones, gay for an hour ; the cold 
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould; 

196 



Rupert Brooke 

Sleep ; and high places ; footprints in the dew ; 
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; 
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; — 
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass. 
Whatever passes not, in the great hour, 
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power 
To hold them with me through the gate of Death. 
They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath, 
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust 
And sacramented covenant to the dust. 
— Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake. 
And give what's left of love again, and make 
New friends, now strangers. . . . 

But the best I've known. 
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown 
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains 
Of living men, and dies. 

Nothing remains. 

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again 

This one last gift I give: that after men 

Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed 

Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say, " He loved." 



197 



Rupert Brooke 



DUST^ 

When the white flame in us is gone, 
And we that lost the world's delight 

Stiffen in darkness, left alone 

To crumble in our separate night; 

When your swift hair is quiet in death, 
And through the lips corruption thrust 

Has stilled the labour of my breath — 
When we are dust, when we are dust! — 

Not dead, not undesirous yet, 

Still sentient, still unsatisfied, 
We'll ride the air, and shine and flit, 

Around the places where we died, 

And dance as dust before the sun. 
And light of foot, and unconfined, 

Hurry from road to road, and run 
About the errands of the wind. 

And every mote, on earth or air. 

Will speed and gleam, down later days, 

And like a secret pilgrim fare 
By eager and invisible ways, 

iProra The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 
1915, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 

198 



Rupert Brooke 

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie, 

Till, beyond thinking, out of view, 

One mote of all the dust that's I 
Shall meet one atom that was you. 

Then in some garden hushed from wind, 
Warm in a sunset's afterglow, 

The lovers in the flowers will find 
A sv/eet and strange unquiet grow 

Upon the peace; and, past desiring, 

So high a beauty in the air. 
And such a light, and such a quiring. 

And such a radiant ecstasy there, 

They'll know not if it's fire, or dew, 
Or out of earth, or in the height, 

Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue. 
Or two that pass, in light, to light. 

Out of the garden higher, higher . . . 

But in that instant they shall learn 
The shattering fury of our fire. 

And the weak passionless hearts will burn 

And faint in that amazing glow, 

Until the darkness close above; 
And they will know — poor fools, they'll 
know ! — 
One moment, what it is to love, 
199 



Rupert Brooke 

THE SOLDIERS 

If I should die, think only this of me; 

That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is for ever England. There shall be 

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
A body of England's breathing English air, 

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England 
given ; 
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 



Winifred M. Letts 

Winifred M. Letts was born in Ireland in 1887, and her early 
work concerned itself almost entirely with the humor and pathos 
found in her immediate surroundings. Her Songs from Leinster 
(1913) is her most characteristic collection; a volume full of 
the poetry of simple people and humble souls. Although she has 
called herself " a back-door sort of bard," she is particularly 
effective in the old ballad measure and in her quaint portrayal 

1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 
1915, by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 

200 



Winifred M, Letts 

of Irish peasants rather than of Gaelic kings and pagan heroes. 
She has also written three novels, five books for children, a 
later volume of Poems of the War and, during the conflict, 
served as a nurse at various base hospitals. 



GRANDEUR 

Poor Mary Byrne is dead, 
An' all the world may see 

Where she lies upon her bed 
Just as fine as quality. 

She lies there still and white, 
With candles either hand 

That'll guard her through the night; 
Sure she never was so grand. 

She holds her rosary, 

Her hands clasped on her breast. 
Just as dacint as can be 

In the habit she's been dressed. 

In life her hands were red 

With every sort of toil, 
But they're white now she is dead, 

An' they've sorra mark of soil. 

The neighbours come and go, 
They kneel to say a prayer, 

I wish herself could know 
Of the way she's lyin' there. 
20 1 



Winifred M. Letts 

It was work from morn till night, 
And hard she earned her bread: 

But I'm thinking she's a right 
To be aisy now she's dead. 

When other girls were gay, 

At wedding or at fair, 
She'd be toiling all the day, 

Not a minyit could she spare. 

An' no one missed her face. 

Or sought her in a crowd, 
But to-day they throng the place 

Just to see her in her shroud. 

The creature in her life 

Drew trouble with each breath; 

She was just " poor Jim Byrne's wife "- 
But she's lovely in her death. 

I wish the dead could see 

The splendour of a wake, 
For it's proud herself would be 

Of the keening that they make. 

Och! little Mary Byrne, 

You welcome every guest, 
Is it now you take your turn 

To be merry with the rest? 
202 



Winifred M. Letts 

I'm thinking you'd be glad, 

Though the angels make your bed, 
Could you see the care we've had 

To respect you — now you're dead. 



THE SPIRES OF OXFORD 

I saw the spires of Oxford 

As I was passing by, 
The grey spires of Oxford 

Against the pearl-grey sky. 
My heart was with the Oxford men 

Who went abroad to die. 

The years go fast in Oxford, 
The golden years and gay, 

The hoary Colleges look down 
On careless boys at play. 

But when the bugles sounded war 
They put their games away. 

The left the peaceful river, 
The cricket-field, the quad, 

The shaven lawns of Oxford, 
To seek a bloody sod — 

They gave their merry youth away 
For country and for God. 
203 



Winifred M. Letts 

God rest you, happy gentlemen, 
Who laid your good lives down. 

Who took the khaki and the gun 
Instead of cap and gown. 

God bring you to a fairer place 
Than even Oxford town. 



Francis Brett Young 

Francis Brett Young, who is a novelist as well as a poet, 
and who has been called, by The Manchester Guardian, " one 
of the promising evangelists of contemporary poetry," has 
written much that is both graceful and grave. There is music 
and a message in his lines that seem to have as their motto: 
" Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man." Best known as a 
writer of prose, his most prominent works are Marching on 
Tanga and The Crescent Moon. 

Brett Young's Five Degrees South (1917) and his Poems 
Igi6-i8 (1919) contain the best of his verse. 



LOCHANILAUN 

This is the Image of my last content: 
My soul shall be a little lonely lake, 
So hidden that np shadow of man may break 
The folding of its mountain battlement; 
Only the beautiful and innocent 
Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake 
Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake 
Of churned cloud in a howling wind's descent. 

204 



Francis Brett Young 

For there shall be no terror in the night 
When stars that I have loved are born in me, 
And cloudy darkness I w^ill hold most fair; 
But this shall be the end of my delight: — 
That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see 
Your image in the mirrored beauty there. 



F. S. Flint 

Known chiefly as an authority on modern French poetry, 
F. S. Flint has published several volumes of original imagist 
poems, besides having translated works of Verhaeren and 
Jean de Bosschere. 



LONDON 

London, my beautiful, 
it is not the sunset 
nor the pale green sky 
shimmering through the curtain 
of the silver birch, 
nor the quietness; 
it is not the hopping 
of birds 

upon the lawn, 
nor the darkness 
stealing over all things 
that moves me. 
205 



F. S. Flint 

But as the moon creeps slowly 

over the tree-tops 

among the stars, 

I think of her 

and the glow her passing 

sheds on men. 

London, my beautiful, 

I will climb 

into the branches 

to the moonlit tree-tops, 

that my blood may be cooled 

by the wind. 



Edith Sitwell - 

Edith Sitwell was born at Scarborough, in Yorkshire, and is 
the sister of the poets, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. In 
1914 she came to London and has devoted herself to literature 
ever since, having edited the various anthologies of Wheels 
since 1916. Her first book. The Mother and Other Poems 
(1915), contains some of her best work, although Clowns' 
Houses (1918) reveals a more piquant idiom and a sharper 
turn of mind. 



THE WEB OF EROS 

Within your magic web of hair, lies furled 
The fire and splendour of the ancient world; 
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair; 
The songs that turned to gold the evening air 

206 



Edith Sitwell 

When all the stars of heaven sang for joy. 
The flames that burnt the cloud-high city Troy. 
The maenad fire of spring on the cold earth; 
The myrrh-lit flame that gave both death and birth 
To the soul Phoenix; and the star-bright shower 
That came to Danae in her brazen tower . . . 
Within your magic web of hair lies furled 
The fire and splendour of the ancient world. 



INTERLUDE 

Amid this hot green glowing gloom 
A word falls with a raindrop's boom . . 

Like baskets of ripe fruit in air 
The bird-songs seem, suspended where 

Those goldfinches — the ripe warm lights 
Peck slyly at them — take quick flights. 

My feet are feathered like a bird 
Among the shadows scarcely heard ; 

I bring you branches green with dew 
And fruits thaf you may crown anew 

Your whirring waspish-gilded hair 
Amid this cornucopia — 

Until your warm lips bear the stains 
And bird-blood leap within your veins. 
207 



F. W. Harvey 

Harvey was a lance-corporal in the English army and was 
in the German prison camp at Giitersloh when he wrote The 
Bugler, one of the isolated great poems written during the war. 
Much of his other verse is haphazard and journalistic, although 
Gloucestershire Friends contains several lines that glow with 
the colors of poetry. 

THE BUGLER 

God dreamed a man; 
Then, having firmly shut 
Life like a precious metal in his fist 
Withdrew, His labour done. Thus did begin 
Our various divinity and sin. 
For some to ploughshares did the metal twist. 
And others — dreaming empires — straightway cut 
Crowns for their aching foreheads. Others beat 
Long nails and heavy hammers for the feet 
Of their forgotten Lord. (Who dares to boast 
That he is guiltless?) Others coined it: most 
Did with it — simply nothing. (Here again 
Who cries his innocence?) Yet doth remain 
Metal unmarred, to each man more or less, 
Whereof to fashion perfect loveliness. 

For me, I do but bear within my hand 
(For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken) 
A simple bugle such as may awaken 
With one high morning note a drowsing man: 
That wheresoe'er within my motherland 
That sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide 
Like pipes of battle calling up a clan, 
Trumpeting men through beauty to God's side. 

208 



T. P. Cameron Wilson 

" Tony " P. Cameron Wilson was born in South Devon in 
1889 and was educated at Exeter and Oxford. He wrote one 
novel besides several articles under the pseudonym Tipuca, a 
euphonic combination of the first three initials of his name. 

When the war broke out he was a teacher in a school at 
Hindhead, Surrey; and, after many months of gruelling con- 
flict, he was given a captaincy. He was killed in action by a 
machine-gun bullet March 23, 1918, at the age of 29. 



SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE 

They left the fury of the fight, 

And they were very tired. 
The gates of Heaven were open quite, 

Unguarded and unwired. 
There was no sound of any gun, 

The land was still and green; 
Wide hills lay silent in the sun, 

Blue valleys slept between. 

They saw far-off a little wood 

Stand up against the sky. 
Knee-deep in grass a great tree stood ; 

Some lazy cows went by . . . 
There were some rooks sailed overhead. 

And once a church-bell pealed. 
" Godf but it's England/* someone said, 

*' And there's a cricket-field I *' 



209 



fV, J. Turner 

W. J. Turner was born in 1889 and, although little known 
until his appearance in Georgian Poetry igi6-i7, has writ- 
ten no few delicate and fanciful poems. The Hunter (1916) 
and The Dark Wind (1918) both contain many verses as mov- 
ing and musical as his splendid lines on " Death," a poem 
which is unfortunately too long to quote. 



ROMANCE 

When I was but thirteen or so 
I went into a golden land, 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
Took me by the hand. 

My father died, my brother too, 
They passed like fleeting dreams, 

I stood where Popocatapetl 
In the sunlight gleams. 

I dimly heard the master's voice 
And boys far-off at play, — 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
Had stolen me away. 

I walked in a great golden dream 
To and fro from school — 

Shining Popocatapetl 

The dusty streets did rule. 

I walked home with a gold dark boy 
And never a word I'd say, 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 

Had taken my speech away. 
210 



W, /. Turner 

I gazed entranced upon his face 
Fairer than any flower — 

O shining Popocatapetl 
It was thy magic hour: 

The houses, people, traffic seemed 

Thin fading dreams by day; 
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, 
They had stolen my soul away! 



Patrick MacGill 

Patrick MacGill was born in Donegal in 1890. He was the 
son of poverty-stricken peasants and, between the ages of la 
and 19, he worked as farm-servant, drainer, potato-digger, and 
navvy, becoming one of the thousands of stray " tramp-labor- 
ers " who cross each summer from Ireland to Scotland to help 
gather in the crops. Out of his bitter experiences and the evils 
of modern industrial life, he wrote several vivid novels {The 
Rat Pit is an unforgettable document) and the tragedy-crammed 
Songs of the Dead End. He joined the editorial staff of The 
Daily Express in 1911; was in the British army during the 
war; was wounded at Loos in 1915; and wrote his Soldier 
Songs during the conflict. 

/ 

BY-THE-WAY 

These be the little verses, rough and uncultured, which 
I've written in hut and model, deep in the dirty ditch. 
On the upturned hod by the palace made for the idle rich. 

211 



Patrick MacGill ^ 

Out on the happy highway, or lines where the engines go, 
Which fact you may hardly credit, still for your doubts 

'tis so, 
For I am the person who wrote them, and surely to God, 

I know! 

Wrote them beside the hot-plate, or under the chilling 

skies, 
Some of them true as death is, some of them merely lies, 
Some of them very foolish, some of them otherwise. 

Little sorrows and hopings, little and rugged rhymes. 
Some of them maybe distasteful to the moral men of our 

times. 
Some of them marked against me in the Book of the 
Many Crimes. 

These, the Songs of a Navvy, bearing the taint of the 

brute, 
Unasked, uncouth, unworthy out to the world I put, 
Stamped with the brand of labor, the heel of a navvy *s 

boot. 



DEATH AND THE FAIRIES 

Before I joined the Army 

I lived in Donegal, 
Where every night the Fairies 

Would hold their carnival. 
212 



Patrick MacGill 

But now I'm out in Flanders, 
Where men like wheat-ears fall, 

And it's Death and not the Fairies 
Who is holding carnival. 



Francis Ledwidge 

Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, County Meath, Ireland, 
in 1891. His brief life was fitful and romantic. He was, at 
various times, a miner, a grocer's clerk, a farmer, a scavenger, 
an experimenter in hypnotism, and, at the end, a soldier. He 
served as a lance-corporal on the Flanders front and was 
killed in July, 1917, at the age of 26 years. 

Ledwidge's poetry is rich in nature imagery; his lines are 
full of color, in the manner of Keats, and unaffectedly melo- 
dious. 



AN EVENING IN ENGLAND 

From its blue vase the rose of evening drops; 

Upon the streams its petals float away. 

The hills all blue with distance hide their tops 

In the dim silence falling on the grey. 

A little wind said " Hush! " and shook a spray 

Heavy with May's white crop of opening bloom; 

A silent bat went dipping in the gloom. 

Night tells her rosary of stars full soon, 
They drop from out her dark hand to her knees. 
Upon a silhouette of woods, the moon 

213 



Francis Ledwidge 

Leans on one horn as if beseeching ease 
From all her changes which have stirred the seas. 
Across the ears of Toil, Rest throws her veil. 
I and a marsh bird only make a wail. 



EVENING CLOUDS 

A little flock of clouds go down to rest 
In some blue corner off the moon's highway, 
With shepherd-winds that shook them in the West 
To borrowed shapes of earth, in bright array, 
Perhaps to weave a rainbow's gay festoons 
Around the lonesome isle which Brooke has made 
A little England full of lovely noons, 
Or dot it with his country's mountain shade. 

Ah, little wanderers, when you reach that isle ^ 
Tell him, with dripping dew, they have not failed, 
What he loved most; for late I roamed a while 
Thro' English fields and down her rivers sailed ; 
And they remember him with beauty caught 
From old desires of Oriental Spring 
Heard in his heart with singing overwrought; 
And still on Purley Common gooseboys sing. 

iThe island of Skyros where Rupert Brooke was buried. (See 
page 194.) 



214 



Irene Rutherford McLeod 

Irene Rutherford McLeod, born August 21, 1891, has written 
three volumes of direct and often distinguished verse, the best 
of which may be found in Songs to Save a 5o«/ (1915) and 
Before Dawn (1918). The latter volume is dedicated to A. 
de Selincourt, to whom she was married in 1919. 

" IS LOVE, THEN, SO SIMPLE " 

Is love, then, so simple my dear? 

The opening of a door, 
And seeing all things clear? 

I did not know before. 

I had thought it unrest and desire 

Soaring only to fall. 
Annihilation and fire: 

It is not so at all. 

I feel no desperate will, 

But I think I understand 
Many things, as I sit quite still, 

With Eternity in my hand. 



LONE DOG 

I'm a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and lone ; 
Fm a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own ; 
Fm a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep; 
I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls 
from sleep. 

215 



Irene Rutherford McLeod 

ril never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet, 
A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat, 
Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate. 
But shut door, and sharp stone, and culi and kick, 
and hate. 

Not for me the other dogs, running by my side. 
Some have run a short w^hile, but none of them 

would bide. 
O mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the 

best. 
Wide wind, and wild stars, and hunger of the quest! 



Richard Aldington 

Richard Aldington was born in England in 1892, and edu- 
cated at Dover College and London University. His first poems 
were published in England in 1909; Images Old and Neiu ap- 
peared in 1915. Aldington and " H. D." (Hilda Doolittle, his 
American wife) are conceded to be two of the foremost imagist 
poets; their sensitive, firm and clean-cut lines put to shame 
their scores of imitators. Aldington's fVar and Love (1918), 
from which "Prelude" is taken, is somewhat more regular in 
pattern; the poems in this latter volume are less consciously 
artistic but warmer and more humanly searching. 



PRELUDE 

How could I love you more? 
I would give up 

Even that beauty I have loved too well 
That I might love you better. 

216 



Richard Aldington 

Alas, how poor the gifts that lovers give— 
I can but give you of my flesh and strength, 
I can but give you these few passing days 
And passionate words that, since our speech began, 
All lovers whisper in all ladies' ears. 

I try to think of some one lovely gift 

No lover yet in all the world has found; 

I think: If the cold sombre gods 

Were hot with love as I am 

Could they not endow you with a star 

And fix bright youth for ever in your limbs? 

Could they not give you all things that I lack? 

You should have loved a god ; I am but dust. 
Yet no god loves as loves this poor frail dust. 



IMAGES 

I 

Like a gondola of green scented fruits 
Drifting along the dank canals of Venice, 
You, O exquisite one. 
Have entered into my desolate city. 

II 

The blue smoke leaps 
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. 
So my love leaps forth toward you. 
Vanishes and is renewed. 
217 



Richard Aldington 

III 

A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky 
When the sunset is faint vermilion 
In the mist among the tree-boughs 
Art thou to me, my beloved. 

IV 

A young beech tree on the edge of the forest 

Stands still in the evening, 

Yet shudders through all its leaves in the 

light air 
And seems to fear the stars — 
So are you still and so tremble. 

V 

The red deer are high on the mountain, 
They are beyond the last pine trees. 
And my desires have run with them. 

VI 

The flower which the wind has shaken 
Is soon filled again with rain; 
So does my heart fill slowly with tears, 
O Foam-Driver, Wind-of-the-Vineyards, 
Until you return. 

AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM 

I turn the page and read: 
" I dream of silent verses where the rhyme 
Glides noiseless as an oar." 

2i8 



Richard Aldington 

The heavy musty air, the black desks, 

The bent heads and the rustling noises 

In the great dome 

Vanish . . . 

And 

The sun hangs In the cobalt-blue sky, 

The boat drifts over the lake shallows, 

The fishes skim like umber shades through the 

undulating vi^eeds, 
The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns, 
And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle 
About the cleft battlements of Can Grande's 

castle. . . . 

Edward Shanks 

Edward Shanks was born in London in 1892 and educated at 
Trinity College, Cambridge. He has reviewed verse and belles 
lettres for several years for various English publications, and is 
at present assistant editor of The London Mercury. His The 
Queen of China and Other Poems appeared late in 1919. 

COMPLAINT 

When in the mines of dark and silent thought 
Sometimes I delve and find strange fancies there, 
With heavy labour to the surface brought 
That lie and mock me in the brighter air, 
Poor ores from starved lodes of poverty, 
Unfit for working or to be refined, 
That In the darkness cheat the miner's eye, 
I turn away from that bas'o cave, the mind. 

219 



Edward Shanks 

Yet had I but the power to crush the stone 
There are strange metals hid in flakes therein, 
Each flake a spark sole-hidden and alone, 
That only cunning, toilsome chemists win. 
All this I know, and yet my chemistry 
Fails and the pregnant treasures useless lie. 



Osbert Sitwell 

Born in London, December 6th, 1892, Osbert Sitwell (son of 
Sir George Sitwell and brother of Edith Sitwell) was edu- 
cated at Eton and became an officer in the Grenadier Guards, 
with whom he served in France for various periods from 1914. 
to 1917. 

His first contributions appeared in Wheels (an annual 
anthology of a few of the younger radical writers, edited by 
his sister) and disclosed an ironic and strongly individual 
touch. That impression is strengthened by a reading of 
Argonaut and Juggernaut (1920), where Sitwell's cleverness 
and satire are fused. His most remarkable though his least 
brilliant poems are his irregular and fiery protests against 
smugness and hypocrisy. But even Sitwell's more conventional 
poetry has a freshness of movement and definiteness of outline. 



THE BLIND PEDLAR 

I stand alone through each long day 
Upon these pavers; cannot see 
The wares spr-^ad out upon this tray 
— For God ha> taken sight from me! 
220 



Osberi SItwell 

Many a time I've cursed the night 
When I was born. My peering eyes 
Have sought for but one ray of light 
To pierce the, darkness. When the skies 

Rain down their first sweet April showers 
On budding branches; when the morn 
Is sweet with breath of spring and flowers, 
I've cursed the night when I was born. 

But now I thank God, and am glad 
For what I cannot see this day 
— The young men cripples, old, and sad, 
With faces burnt and torn away; 

Or those who, growing rich and old. 
Have battened on the slaughter. 
Whose faces, gorged with blood and gold, 
Are creased in purple laughter! 



PROGRESS 

The city's heat is like a leaden pall — 
Its lowered lamps glow in the midnight air 
Like mammoth orange-moths that flit and flare 
Through the dark tapestry of night. The tall 
Black houses crush the creeping beggars down. 
Who walk beneath and think of breezes cool, 
Of silver bodies bathing in a pool ; 

221 



Osbert Sitwell 

Or trees that whisper in some far, small town 
Whose quiet nursed them, when they thought that 
Was merely metal, not a grave of mould 
In which men bury all that's fine and fair. 
When they could chase the jewelled butterfly 
Through the green bracken-scented lanes or sigh 
For all the future held so rich and rare; 
When, though they knew it not, their baby cries 
Were lovely as the jewelled butterflies. 

Robert Nichols 

Robert Nichols was born on the Isle of Wight in 1893. His 
first volume, Invocations (1915), was published while he was 
at the front, Nichols having joined the army while he was still 
an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. After serving 
one year as second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, he 
«vas incapacitated by shell shock, visiting America in 1918-19 
as a lecturer. His Ardours and Endurances (1917) is the most 
representative work of this poet, although his new volume, 
The Flower of Flame (1920), shows a steady advance in 
power. 

NEARER 

Nearer and ever nearer ... * 

My body, tired but tense. 
Hovers 'tvdxt vague pleasure 
And tremulous confidence. 

Arms to have and to use them 
And a soul to be made 
Worthy, if not worthy; 
If afraid, unafraid. 
222 



Robert Nichols 

To endure for a little, 
To endure and have done: 
Men I love about me, 
Over me the sun! 

And should at last suddenly 
Fly the speeding death. 
The four great quarters of heaven 
Receive this little breath. 



Charles Hamilton Sorley 

Charles Hamilton Sorley, who promised greater things than 
any of the younger poets, was born at Old Aberdeen in May, 
1895. He studied at Marlborough College and University 
College, Oxford. He was finishing his studies abroad and was 
on a walking-tour along the banks of the Moselle when the 
war came. Sorley returned home to receive an immediate com- 
mission in the 7th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. In Au- 
gust, 1915, at the age of 20, he was made a captain. On Octo- 
ber 13, 1915, he was killed in action near Hulluch. 

Sorley left but one book, Marlborough and Other Poems. The 
verse contained in it is sometimes rough but never rude. Al- 
though he admired Masefield, loveliness rather than liveliness 
was his aim. Restraint, tolerance, and a dignity unusual for a 
boy of 20, distinguish his poetry. 



TWO SONNETS 

I 

Saints have adored the lofty soul of you. 
Poets have whitened at your high renown. 
We stand among the many millions who 
Do hourly wait to pass your pathway down. 

223 



Charles Hamilton Sorley 

You, so familiar, once were strange: we tried 

To live as of your presence unaware. 

But now in every road on every side 

We see your straight and steadfast signpost there. 

I think it like that signpost in my land 
Hoary and tall, which pointed me to go 
Upward, into the hills, on the right hand, 
Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and 

blow, 
A homeless land and friendless, but a land 
I did not know and that I wished to know. 

II 

Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat: 
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, 
A merciful putting away of what has been. 

And this we know : Death is not Life effete, 
Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen 
So marvellous things know well the end not yet. 

Victor and vanquished are a-one in death: 

Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say, 

" Come, what was your record when you drew 

breath?" 
But a big blot has hid each yesterday 
So poor, so manifestly incomplete. 
And your bright Promise, withered long and sped, 
Is touched ; stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet 
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead. 



224 



Charles Hamilton S or ley 

TO GERMANY 

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, 
And no man claimed the conquest of your land. 
But gropers both, through fields of thought confined, 
We stumble and we do not understand. 
You only saw your future bigly planned. 
And we the tapering paths of our own mind, 
And in each other's dearest ways we stand. 
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. 

When it is peace, then we may view again 
With new-won eyes each other's truer form 
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm 
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, 
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm, 
The darkness and the thunder and the rain. 



Robert Graves 

Robert Graves was born July 26, 1895. One of "the three 
rhyming musketeers " (the other two being the poets Siegfried 
Sassoon and Robert Nichols), he was one of several writers 
who, roused by the war and giving himself to his country, 
refused to glorify warfare or chant new hymns of hate. Like 
Sassoon, Graves also reacts against the storm of fury and 
blood-lust (see his poem "To a Dead Boche"), but, fortified 
by a lighter and more whimsical spirit, where Sassoon is vio- 
lent, Graves is volatile; where Sassoon is bitter, Graves is 
almost blithe. 

An unconquerable gayety rises from his Fairies and Fusiliers 
(1917), a surprising and healing humor that is warmly indi- 

225 



Robert Graves 

vidual. In Country Sentiment (1919) Graves turns to a fresh 
and more serious simplicity. But a buoyant fancy ripples be- 
neath the most archaic of his ballads and a quaintly original 
turn of mind saves them from their own echoes. 



IT'S A QUEER TIME 

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead 

When steel and fire go roaring through your head. 

One moment you'll be crouching at 5^our gun 
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun: 
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast — 
No time to think — leave all — and off you go . . . 
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, 
To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime — 
Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Red West! 
It's a queer time. 

You're charging madly at them yelling " Fag! " 
When somehow something gives and your feet drag. 
You fall and strike your head ; yet feel no pain 
And find . . . you're digging tunnels through the 

hay 
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. 
Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb! 
You're back in the old sailor suit again. 
It's a queer time. 
226 



Robert Graves 

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out — 

A great roar — the trench shakes and falls about — 

You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . , 

hullo! 
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench, 
Hanky to nose — that lyddite makes a stench — 
Getting her pinafore all over grime. 
Funny! because she died ten years ago! 
It's a queer time. 

The trouble is, things happen much too quick; 
Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click. 
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away: 
Even good Christians don't like passing straight 
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate 
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime 
Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well 
to-day . . . 

It's a queer time. 



A PINCH OF SALT 

When a dream is born in you 

With a sudden clamorous pain. 
When you know the dream is true 

And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, 
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch 
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much. 

227 



Robert Graves 

Dreams are like a bird that mocks, 

Flirting the feathers of his tail. 
When you seize at the salt-box, 

Over the hedge you'll see him sail. 
Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff 
They watch you from the apple bough and laugh. 

Poet, never chase the dream. 

Laugh yourself, and turn away. 
Mask your hunger; let it seem 

Small matter if he come or stay; 
But when he nestles in your hand at last. 
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast. 



I WONDER WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO 
BE DROWNED? 

Look at my knees, 

That island rising from the steamy seas! 

The candle's a tall lightship; my two hands 

Are boats and barges anchored to the sands, 

With mighty cliffs all round; 

They're full of wine and riches from far lands. . . . 

I ivonder what it feels like to be drowned? 

I can make caves, 

By lifting up the island and huge waves 
And storms, and then with head and ears well under 
Blow bubbles with a monstrous roar like thunder, 

228 



Robert Graves 

A bull-of-Bashan sound. 

The seas run high and the boats spht asunder . . 

/ wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 

The thin soap slips 

And slithers like a shark under the ships. 

My toes are on the soap-dish — that's the effect 

Of my huge storms ; an iron steamer's wrecked. 

The soap slides round and round; 

He's biting the old sailors, I expect. . . . 

/ wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 



THE LAST POST 

The bugler sent a call of high romance — 

" Lights out! Lights out! " to the deserted square. 

On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer: 

** God, if it's this for me next time in France, 

O spare the phantom bugle as I lie 

Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns, 

Dead in a row with other broken ones, 

Lying so stiff and still under the sky — 

Jolly young Fusiliers, too good to die . . . " 

The music ceased, and the red sunset flare 

Was blood about his head as he stood there. 



229 



INDEX 



Names of Authors are in Capitals, 
Abercrombie, Lascelles, xxiv, 

174-177 

"A. E.," xvii, 76-77 

Aftermath, 192 

Aldington, Richard, 216-219 

All-Souls, 44 

An Athlete Dying Young, To, 

38 
An Old Fogey, To, 45 
Arab Love-Song, An, 35 
Astrologer's Song, An, 66 
At the British Museum, 218 
A Traveller, To, 'jz 
Austin, Alfred, xii, 5, 27 

Ballad of Hell, A, 22 
Ballad of London, A, 69 
Ballad of the Billycock, The, 

90 
Barrel-Organ, The, 154 
Beautiful Lie the Dead, 78 
Beauty's a Floiver, 100 
Before, 11 
Beg-Innish, 95 
Belloc, Hilaire, 86-89 
BiNYON, Laurence, 79-80 
Birdcatcher, The, 144 
Blackbird, The, 10 
Blind Pedlar, The, 220 
Bo<wl of Roses, A, ii 
Bridges, Robert, 5-7 
Broken Song, A, 99 
Brooke, Rupert, xxiii, 193- 

200 
Bugler, The, 208 
By-the-lVay, 211 



Titles of Poems are in Italics. 

Campbell, Joseph, 165-166 

Cap and Bells, The, 54 

Chesson Nora {see Nora 
Hopper) 

Chesterton, G. K., xxiii, i lo- 
ng 

Choice, The, 131 

Clair de Lune, loz 

Cock-Croiv, 138 

CoLUM, Padraic, xvii, 162- 
165 

Complaint, 219 

Connaught Lament, A, 97 

Consecration, A, 126 

Conundrum of the IVork- 
shops, The, 63 

Cornford, Frances, 184-186 

Daisy, 32 
Dauber, xxii, 128 
Davidson, John, 22-27 
Davies, W. H., xxiii, xxv, 

83-86 
Days Too Short, 84 
Deane, Anthony C., 89-93 
Death and the Fairies, 212 
De la Mare, Walter, xxiii, 

105-110 
Donkey, The, 119 
Douglas, Alfred, 80-81 
DowsoN, Ernest, 73-76 
Drake's Drum, 49 
Dream, A, 79 
Dreamers, 190 
Drinkwater, John, xxiv, 170- 

171 



231 



Index 



DuNSANY, Edward Lord, 133- 

136 
Dust, 198 
Dying -S'Lvan, The, 82 

Epilogue, 161 

Epitaph, 43 

Epitaph, An, 107 

Estrangement, 30 

Eve, 140 

Evening Clouds, 214 

Evening in England, An, 213 

Everlasting Mercy, The, xxii 

Every Thing, 146 

Example, The, 86 

Fi/Zy Faggots, 137 

Flecker, James Elrot, 178- 

179 
F/^^/ 5/r^^/, 183 
Flint, F. S., 205-206 
Freeman, John, 181-182 

Georgians, The, xi, xxlli- 

xxiv 
Germany, To, 225 
Gibson, W. W., xxiii, xxv, 

119-125 
Gilbert, W. S.,_xiv 
Going and Staying, 4 
Gore-Booth, Eva, 98-99 
Grandeur, 201 
Graves, Robert, xxili, 225- 

229 
Great Breath, The, 76 
Great Lover, The, 195 
Green River, The, 81 
Gunga Din, 57 

Hardy, Thomas, xvi, 3-4 
Harvey, F. W., 208 
Henley, W. E., xi, xv-xvii, 

" Herod'* Fragment from, 78 
Hinkson, Katharine Tynan, 
xvii, 43-45 



Hodgson, Ralph, xxiii, xxv, 

139-144 
Hopper, Nora, 97 
House, A, 172 
House that Was, The, 80 
Housman, a. E., xxv, 36-40 
HuEFFER, F, M., 102-105 
Hyde, Douglas, xvii, 40-41 

7 am the Mountainy Singer, 

165 
7 Hear an Army, 171 
I Shall not Die for Thee, 40 
7 Wonder What It Feels Like 

to be Droivned? 228 
If I Should Ever Groiv Rich, 

136 
Images, 217 
Imagination, 26 
Impression du Matin, 21 
In Flanders Fields, 101 
Interlude, 207 
In the Mile End Road, 42 
In the Wood of Finvara, 50 
In Time of " The Breaking of 

Nations," 3 
Invictus, 10 

"Is Love, then, so simple," 215 
It's a Queer Time, 226 

Jackson, Holbrook, xiv-xv 
Johnson, Lionel, xvii, 71-73 
Joyce, James, 171 
Kettle, T. M., 149-150 
Kipling, Rudyard, xi, xx-xxi, 

56-68 
Lake Isle of Innisfree, The, 

53 
Last Post, The, 229 
Lawrence, D. H., xxiii, 179- 

181 
Ledwidge, Francis, 213-214 
Le Gallienne, Richard, xv, 

68-70 
Lepanto, m 
Leslie, Shane, 183-184 



232 



Index 



Letts, W. M., 200-204 
Levy, Amy, 41-43 
Listeners, The, 106 
Lcchanilaun, 204 
London, 205 
Lone Dog, 215 
"Loveliest of Trees" 39 

MacCathmhaoil Seosamh {see 

Joseph Campbell) 
MacGill, Patrick, 21 1-2 13 
MACLEOD, Fiona, 18-19 
McLeod, Irene R., 215-216 
McCrae, John, ioi 
Man He Killed, The, 4 
Margarita Sorori, 12 
Masefield, John, xi, xxi-xxii, 

XXV, 125-132 
Meynell, Alice, 16-17 
Modern Beauty, 51 
Monro, Harold, 144-149 
Moon, The, 85 
Moore, George, xviii 
Moore, T. Sturge, 81-83 
My Daughter Betty, To, 150 
Mystery, The, 144 
Mystic and Cavalier, 71 

Nearer, 222 

Newbolt, Henry, xxiv, 49-50 
Nichols, Robert, 222-223, 225 
Nightingale near the House, 

The, 145 
Nightingales 7 
Nod, 109 
NoYES, Alfred, xxiii, 150-162 

Oaks of Glencree, To the, 96 
Ode, 8 

Ode in May, 28 
Old Ships, The, 178 
Old Song Resung, An, 55 
Old Susan, 108 
Old Woman, The, 166 
Old Woman of the Roads, An, 
164 



Olivia, To, 34 
One in Bedlam, To, 74 
O'Neill, Moira, xvii, 99-100 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 8-9 
O'Sullivan, Seumas, 138-139 

Pater of the Cannon, The, 183 

People, 180 

Phillips, Stephen, 77-79 

Piano, 180 

Pinch of Salt, A, 227 

Plougher The, 162 

Praise, 139 

Prayer in Darkness, A, 118 

Preexistence, 184 

Prelude, 120 

Prelude, 216 

Progress, 221 

Reality, 186 

Rear-Guard, The, 190 

Reciprocity, 170 

Regret, 70 

Requiem, 16 

Requiescat, 20 

Return, The, 61 

Reveille, 36 

Romance, 15 

Romance, 210 

Rounding the Horn, 128 

Russell, George W., (j^^ 

Rustic Song, A, 92 

Sassoon, Siegfried, xxiii, 187- 

193, 225 
Seaman, Ow^en, 45-48 
Sea-Fever, 127 
Shanks, Edward, 219-220 
Sharp, William {see Fiona 

MacLeod) 
Shaw, G. B., 20, 83 
Sheep and Lambs, 43 
Shell, The, 167 
Sherwood, 151 
Sight, 124 



233 



Index 



Silence Sings, 82 
Singer, The, 186 
SiTWELL, Edith, 206-207 

SiTWELL, OSBERT, 220-222 

Soldier, The, 200 

Song, 31 

Song, 187 

Song, A, 79 

Song {from "Judith"), 176 

Song of the Old Mother, The, 

53 
Songs from an Evil Wood, 

133 
Sonnet, 132 
SoRLEY, Charles Hamilton, 

223-225 
South Country, The, 87 
Spires of Oxford, The, 203 
Sportsmen in Paradise, 209 
Squire, J. C, xxiv, 172-174 
Stephens, James, xxiii, 167- 

169 
Stevenson, R. L., xvi, 13-16 
Stone The, 121 
Stone Trees, 181 
Strange Meetings, 149 
Summer Sun, 13 
Symons, Arthur, xv, 50-51 
Synge, J. M., xviii-xx, xxii, 

93-96 '• 

Tall Nettles, 137 
Tennyson, Alfred, xii, 49 
" There Shall be more Joy," 

104 
Thomas, Edward, 136-138 
Thomas of the Light Heart, 47 
Thompson, Francis, 31-35 
Thrush before Daivn, A, 16 
Thrushes, 191 
Time, You old Gipsy Man, 

142 
Tired Tim, 108 



To The Four Courts, Please, 

169 
Toicn Windoiu, A, 170 
Translation from Petrarch, A, 

96 
Tupper, Martin F,, xii 
Turner, W. J., 210-21 1 
T1V0 Sonnets, 223 
Tynan, Katharine (Hink- 

son), xvii, 43-45 

Unknoivn God, The, 77 

y alley of Silence, The, i8 
" Vashti," From, 175 
Victorians, The, xi-xiii, xx 
Victory, To, 189 
Villain, The, 85 
Vision, The, 19 

Walls, 99 

Watson, William, 27-31 
Waves of Breffny, The, 98 
Web of Eros, The, 206 
What To mas an Buile Said, 

168 
When J Was One-and- 

Tvuenty, 37 
WicKHAM, Anna, 186-187 
Wilde, Oscar, xiii-xv, 19-22, 

68 
Williams, Harold, xviii, 105 
Wilson, T. P. C, 209 
Winter Nightfall 5 
Winter-Time, 14 
With Rue my Heart is Laden, 

38 

Yeats, W. B., xvi, xvii-xix, 

52-56, 94 
Young, Francis Brett, 204 
You Would Have Understood 

Me, 75 



234 



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